Hello! This is a re-post of previously posted patches following Daniel Berrange's request for changes along with other fixes PLUS a rebase to the latest code where the conn parameter is missing along with changes requested by Daniel Veillard. The following patches provide support for making the macvtap networking device type available to Qemu/KVM VMs. The patches rely on the macvtap driver that just became available through the Linux net-next tree (fixes still may be necessary) and make the device available to Qemu/KVM via a tap file descriptor similar to a 'regular' tap device. Following up on previous discussions, the libvirt patches allow using the following XML in the domain description to enable qemu network connectivity via this type of device: <interface type='direct'> <source dev='eth1' mode='vepa'/> <model type='virtio'/> </interface> The above XML indicates that eth1 is the Ethernet interface to link the macvtap device to and communicate to the network. As a consequence, libvirt will create an instance of a macvtap device, assign it the same MAC address as the VM's interface has and open a file descriptor of the associated character device /dev/tap%d and pass it via command line to Qemu/kvm. In the above XML the mode can be chosen as 'vepa', 'private' or 'bridge' and is by default set to 'vepa'(by the driver) if omitted. Attachment and detachment of macvtap to/from a running VM also works. Regards, Stefan