NIC type (rtl vs virtio)

[Nux!]

On 19.11.2012 16:23, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 11/19/2012 03:23 PM, Nux! wrote:
>> On 19.11.2012 14:56, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>> On 11/18/2012 08:22 PM, Nux! wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I notice the VMs are not using the virtio type NICs, but some 
>>>> "Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. 
>>>> RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+".
>>>> In my experience the virtio device is quite stable, any reason why 
>>>> it's not default? I see that for block device virtio is default.
>>>
>>>
>>> This is something we should look at changing by default I think.
>>> There have are some kernel bugs precluding this:
>>> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42829
>>> But Red Hat based kernels should be good in this area.
>>>
>>> It seems like it's a big global flag in nova.conf currently:
>>>   libvirt_use_virtio_for_bridges = True
>>> Ideally that would be a property of the guest image,
>>> i.e. a tag in glance or something.
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>> Pádraig.
>>
>> Thanks Pádraig, that worked!
>>
>> Indeed I understand virtio_net is not default due to some ubuntu 
>> kernel bugs or such like.
>
> Also it needs guest support, so for widest range of guest support
> I suppose we couldn't change the global default.
>
> Also for installations with very disparate guest images,
> the per image attributes would be needed, and
> allow more tuned config.

Per image attributes would be really nice, but talking about global 
defaults it's funny that virtio_blk was default whereas virtio_net was 
not; I guess it depends on what worked on Ubuntu at the time.
As per guest support I have found virtio to work reasonably well with 
Windows[1] and Freebsd[2].

[1] - 
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/
[2] - http://people.freebsd.org/~kuriyama/virtio/

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Nux!
www.nux.ro