Multicast networking?

[fragglet]

Hi,

BasiliskII (and Sheepshaver too maybe?) supports UDP-based networking that uses broadcast packets encapsulating an Ethernet frame. While this is a useful way to get simple networking without needing elevated privileges it has some downsides:

1. You can only have a single VM per machine since multiple VMs can't bind to the same port
2. Broadcast goes to every machine on the network
3. Only works with BasiliskII and nothing else

qemu and User-Mode Linux have both adopted the same multicast transport scheme which fixes both (1) and (2) above (the multiple-bind thing can be solved using SO_REUSEPORT but only if it's a multicast port). Plus you'd get the benefit of being able to interact with other types of virtual machine on the same network.

Would you accept a patch that implements this?

[cebix]

Yes, that would be very interesting!