Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 1/1] Make the e1000 the default network adapter for the pc target.

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 01:11:07PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 07:56:50PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > Our users will hate us if we do this.  We should look at XP's actual  
> > market share, not formal statements from Microsoft.  If market share  
> > starts dropping, we can scale back support in qemu.
> >
> > Providing less than optimal performance is a lot better than starting up  
> > with no networking.  In any case optimal performance requires a  
> > non-default selection (virtio).
> 
> Well if e1000 gives 95% of the virtio performance, and 8139 gives 50%,
> then I know which I will be using.  Personally I don't care which one
> is default, since I will use e1000 with bridging anyhow.

Well, since I need it only for internet and that connection is only 90
kB/s I'd use whichever "just works" as long as it gets more than... I
guess 1% of virtio performance...
Just saying, not everyone actually needs much performance (particularly
for the network adapters), and I suspect many that do will have to do
quite a bit of configuration/customization anyway.
Though from my tests with rtl8139 (not working usably at all with
MacOSX, though it seems to have worked unreliably for others) it is
possible that the bad performance is actually due to some bug that
makes it unreliable, in which case it might be a rather bad choice.
If there's someone to code it, there's also the choice of providing
"profiles" for specific OSs, so e.g. -profile WinXP would select the
"best" hardware for that and -profile "Win2008" something else and that
kind of selection might be something people have come to expect from
VM software (sudden hardware changes due to changed profiles after a
qemu update are an issue with that though)...