Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> rtl8139 is a 100Mbit card, you really don't want your virtual network speed
> hobbled by emulating such gear.

It doesn't work like that. The nominal speed of the card is merely that of the real card being emulated - in the emulated version, there's no serial pipe to get the bits through (just in-memory copies/moves) and the actual throughput will be whatever the chain of bits can push through it. That's certainly the case with Xen which (AIUI) uses Qemu for the I/O stuff.


Having said that, people bitten by "cr*p hardware or drivers" tend to have long memories - Realtek is a make I prefer to avoid. Now, Intel e1000 is a different matter.
Yeah, I know - the newer stuff is OK, and it's only emulated not real hardware, but memories of pain are memories of pain.