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
