primalmotion/Archipel — Issue #378: Change default network driver
Author: og01
Created: 2012-01-01 04:58:36+00:00
State: open

When adding a network driver to a VM the default is the the pcnet driver.

After having some serious performance issues (after prolonged use the guest's interface would grind to a halt) The qemu log file indicated some problem with the pcnet driver.

According to the qemu documentation http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Networking the rtl8139 driver should be the default for qemu-kvm and e1000 should be the default for qemu.

To check my findings I changed one of my vms back to using the pcnet driver and the problem recurred, while the others using the rtl8139 driver remained in good order.

Since the performance issues have since disappeared since following these guidelines, I suggest they should be adopted as the default option within the Archipel client.