Re: [PATCH 09/28] hw/net: mark e1000, e1000e, IGB, rtl8139 & sPAPR VLAN as secure

[Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 11:12:55AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Sept 2026 at 15:42, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Historically most NICs are only interesting for non-virtualization
> > use cases and have not been written with malicious guests in mind.
> >
> > As a general rule either virtio-net or xen-net should be used in
> > all virtualized guests requiring a security boundary.
> >
> > There are a handful of exceptions resulting from historical usage
> > in the x86 world, to support virtualized guests lacking virtio
> > support.
> >
> > Thus the rtl8139, e1000, e1000e & IGB NICs are declared to provide
> > a security boundary.
> 
> You've said in several bugs (e.g.
> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/work_items/3872 )
> that igb wasn't covered by the virtualization use case.

Hmm, yes, I forgot I had said that, which I guess shows the value
of this series long term.

> I don't care either way, but I wanted to check since I've been
> marking igb bugs as non-confidential when triaging on the
> basis of that...

I added it in this series because I forgot what I previously said
and then found our RHEL shipped it. I've since checked that the
RHEL inclusion was only for ease of SRIOV testing, not intended for
production deployment.

So consider 'igb' dropped from this patch. We'll continue to treat
it as insecure, unless a maintainer steps up to request otherwise
and fix historical issues we've had disclosed this year.

With regards,
Daniel
-- 
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