sensible default NIC for x86? (virtio, not e1000)
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
qemu (Ubuntu) |
Opinion
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Booting an image that uses linux-kvm from the Ubuntu archive fails to find a network when using a minimal qemu commandline:
kvm -m 256 -net nic -net user,id=
This fails because:
-net nic[,vlan=
[...] The NIC is an e1000 by default on the PC target.
e1000 is a sensible least-common-
But it's clearly inferior to virtio in every other way, and I don't think we want to enable the e1000 in the linux-kvm build - I think we want people to configure their VMs to use virtio instead of e1000, which is the default in various frontends to qemu. I think anyone who is configuring a kvm instance for running Linux as a guest, and uses e1000 instead of virtio, has it misconfigured.
Would it therefore make sense at this point in time to change the default NIC driver for qemu from e1000 to virtio?
I don't think so.
From a hypervisor perspective, general function I think is more important than running as fast as possible. Historically users have always enabled additional speed by swapping out emulated devices for paravirtual ones.
For users of the command line, changing the default will have impact on commands that are currently working with e1000 that may not work without it.
I suspect that the number of OSes with e1000 support is still far greater than ones that come with virtio drivers. At a minumum, Windows images don't include virtio drivers by default, so this change would catch all of those users.