TAP Interface

Running with a TAP interface provides either local or global connectivity (depending on how the TAP interface is configured and/or bridged). From the perspective of the QEMU command line, both look the same, however. You simply add something like this to the command line:

-net tap,ifname=tap2 -net nic,model=rtl8139

The first -net option indicates that you want to use a tap interface, specifically tap2. The second -net option specifies that this interface will appear to code in the QEMU machine to be a network interface card of the specific model RTL8139. Note that this is a model for which we have a driver. If tap2 were bridged, we'd get global connectivity. If not, we would just get local connectivity.