Qemu tap networking method from wiki

Question

The method described in the wiki for tap networking wouldn't work for me unless I ran run-qemu with sudo. I found another method using -net bridge rather than -net tap which seems simpler and more powerful and does not require root. I put an entry in the wiki describing how I did it.
I'm kind of suspicious since it seems to be superior to the other method, which seems to be prevalent all over the web. I'm hoping a few people would be willing to give it a test. It's also my first substantial wiki edit, so advice/criticism in that regard would be welcomed.

Answer 1

Maybe I didn't explain myself clearly, what I meant is that the setup of the bridges or the vde switch requires root, but using them can be done as a normal user, so in that regard they are similar.
On another note I was curious about performance, and as I suspected, using a bridge is faster. I did a few tests with iperf and I got something like this:
Using vde2 (-net nic,model=virtio -net vde):
- iperf running as server on the guest
-- unidirectional test: 301Mbit/s
-- bidirectional test : 136Mbit/s + 239MBit/s
- iperf running as server on the host
-- unidirectional test: 338Mbit/s
-- bidirectional test : 237Mbit/s + 135MBit/s
Using the bridge (-net nic,model=virtio -net bridge,br=virbr):
- iperf running as server on the guest
-- unidirectional test: 500Mbit/s
-- bidirectional test : 250Mbit/s + 248MBit/s
- iperf running as server on the host
-- unidirectional test: 544Mbit/s
-- bidirectional test : 251Mbit/s + 266MBit/s
Edit:
I'm now a happy user of the method you suggested
Last edited by R00KIE (2013-03-22 22:29:04)