[libvirt-users] using vmchannel between 6.x host/guests

Hi all. Having trouble figuring out the magic to set up VMChannel comms between EL6.x host/guests. My end goal is to enable fence_virt in the guest to talk to fence_virtd on the host via VMChannel. I'd prefer to use that instead of multicast because it is supposed to work even if networking in the guest is down/borked. My analysis is that there is a mismatch between what libvirt is feeding qemu-kvm and what qemu-kvm is willing to accept: virt-install option: --channel unix,path=/var/run/cluster/fence/foobar,mode=bind,target_type=guestfwd,target_address=10.0.2.179:1229 turns into this XML: <channel type='unix'> <source mode='bind' path='/var/run/cluster/fence/foobar'/> <target type='guestfwd' address='10.0.2.179' port='1229'/> </channel> Which then gets fed to qemu-kvm as this: -chardev socket,id=charchannel0,path=/var/run/cluster/fence/foobar,server,nowait -netdev user,guestfwd=tcp:10.0.2.179:1229,chardev=charchannel0, id=user-channel0 And then qemu-kvm barfs like so: qemu-kvm: -netdev user,guestfwd=tcp:10.0.2.179:1229,chardev=charchannel0,id=user-channel0: Invalid parameter 'chardev' Versions: libvirt-0.9.10-21.el6.1 qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.295.el6 NB: I did try this with the versions in 6.2, got the same result. Upgraded to these versions to see if the problem went away, but no joy. NB2: The fence_virt.conf manpage lists the following as example XML for defining a channel device: <channel type=’unix’> <source mode=’bind’ path=’/sandbox/guests/fence_molly_vmchannel’/> <target type=’guestfwd’ address=’10.0.2.179’ port=’1229’/> </serial> Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I can fall back to multicast, of course, but I'd like to make this work if possible. Thanks! Mike