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? Thanks! /mjt (*) can we make ne2k-pci to ebe an alias for ne2k_pci, to be consistent with virtio-net-pci?
