No more non-root networking modes?

[Tiwei Bie]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:31:31 -0600, Glenn Washburn wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm just now noticing that earlier this year obsolete networking
> transports were removed (commit 65eaac591b75). This included SLiRP,
> which was to my knowledge the only transport that supported network
> access as an unprivileged user (no privileged access needed to setup
> the transport either). Am I wrong about that? If not, I'm curious as to
> why functionality that could not be achieved by other means was
> dropped? And if there are any work arounds? I can understand why other
> transports that need privileged access to setup, but were inferior to
> other existing transports would be removed. I write this as someone who
> is currently using the SLiRP transport.

vec also supports networking without privileged access:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.17/virt/uml/user_mode_linux_howto_v2.html#vde-vector-transport
https://lore.kernel.org/all/bfa07f4d-16a3-476b-9314-b8052ec198b1@antgroup.com/

Regards,
Tiwei