Upstream qemu and KVM contain a very small patch which adds vmchannel (-net channel) support: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html This bug is to track whether we can add this patch for RHEL 5.4. I know this is a bit late in the day ...
I took a good look at the code, and the patch is non-trivial to apply. We will look instead at whether we can get the required support into EPEL's qemu. Pushing this out until at least 5.5, and perhaps dropping it entirely.
An updated qemu has been pushed to EPEL, which reduces the need for this in RHEL. Closing the bug.
Created attachment 354132 [details] kvm-specify-vmchannel-as-a-net-option.patch Reopening this bug for consideration for inclusion in 5.5 (or 5.4 if there is time). I have an updated and tested patch which applies cleanly to our current KVM package in RHEL 5.4 Beta.
Everyone keeps asking me about this, so: We just posted a patch to upstream libguestfs which removes the use of vmchannel entirely **although it still requires SLIRP (user mode networking)** in qemu/kvm: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2009-September/msg00113.html *Assuming* that no major problems are found in this (which is still not reviewed upstream), then it would make this BZ obsolete. However as noted above, we still need SLIRP in qemu.
Patch to libguestfs went in, seems to be working. I'm going to close this bug for now as a result.