Re: [Qemu-devel] is it just me or is ne2k broken in qemu?

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2011-04-14 at 12:31 +0400, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> I performed several tests of various emulated NICs
> booting with iPXE, and discovered that ne2k_pci (*)
> emulated device does not quite work, for quite some
> time already, at least with linux guests.
> 
> The NIC works for a while, but after a few packets,
> or a few 1000s of packets, it stalls.  In tcpdump
> on the host I see many ARP requests coming from the
> guest and each has corresponding ARP reply, but
> nothing is actually reaching the guest.
> 
> This behavour is consistent since qemu-kvm 0.12,
> and is demonstrated by guest kernel 2.6.32 and
> 2.6.38, either 32 or 64bit.
> 
> Anyone seen something similar?

For testing the iPXE ROMs I booted up each NIC, including ne2k_pci, to a
network loaded kernel (~4M) and installation initrd (~8M).  I stopped
the test at the point where the installer kernel was able to
successfully DHCP with the boot NIC.  ne2k_pci was definitely the
slowest of the cards at loading the images, but I didn't notice any
functionality issues.  Maybe I didn't let it run long enough, but the
boot ROM seems ok with it.

Alex