[libvirt] Compiling libvirt for QEMU on OSX

[Laine Stump]

  On 10/23/2010 02:07 PM, Justin Clift wrote:
> Hi us,
>
> It turns out that QEMU is available on OSX, and kept up to date.  The
> new QEMU release (0.13.0) is already on there.
>
> When trying out compilation of libvirt for QEMU on OSX (--with-qemu),
> configure gives this error:
>
>    configure: error: You must install kernel-headers in order to compile
> libvirt with QEMU or LXC support
>
> Looking in configure.ac, shows this:
>
>    dnl
>    dnl check for kernel headers required by src/bridge.c
>    dnl
>    if test "$with_qemu" = "yes" || test "$with_lxc" = "yes" ; then
>      AC_CHECK_HEADERS([linux/param.h linux/sockios.h linux/if_bridge.h
> linux/if_tun.h],,
>                     AC_MSG_ERROR([You must install kernel-headers in
> order to compile libvirt with QEMU or LXC support]))
>    fi
>
> (as a side note, there's no "src/bridge.c" only a "src/util/bridge.c"
>   so we should probably update that comment)
>
> So it looks like we have a hard dependency at the moment, to use Linux
> bridging if QEMU is enabled.
>
> Does anyone know how practical it would be, to change that to allow
> for QEMU to be used on OSX without needing the Linux bridge bits?


I haven't looked at how practical it is, but it would certainly be nice 
to have it that way, since qemu is usable without it.


> I'm kind of thinking that on OSX, QEMU is probably doing it's
> connection to host networking in some other way instead.  (haven't
> checked)
>

My guess would be that it's probably using qemu's user mode networking. 
There's some info on it here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Networking