[Qemu-devel] Re: [kvm-devel] [PATCH] e1000 emulation code

[Dor Laor]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 23:08 -0500, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote:
> On Wednesday 09 January 2008, Dor Laor wrote:
> > Some figures: Linux rx 350Mbps, tx 150bps, Windows rx 700mbps, tx 100 mbps.
> 
> very nice!
> 
> in a related note, the VMWare tools package, which is supposed to 'enhance 
> performance' by installing 'specially tuned' drivers into a guest, doesn't 
> include net or HD drivers for linux!  i was surprised, but it simply said 

Vmware has a nice trick to online change an emulated amd nic into a pv
mode nic.

> that using e1000 emulation on 64bit linux was optimised enough.  since i saw 
> good performance (no hard benchmarks, but definitely not bad); i thought that 
> they do some paravirtualizification at runtime as part of their software 
> recompiling (because they're much older than HVM-capable processors).
> 
> now it seems that there are higher-level hardware that can be emulated far 
> more efficiently than the original set of QEMU hardware.

This is just a newer device with some coalescing abilities and tso, pv
driver can always be better since they are not bound to any
specification.

btw: I wonder when qemu will get virtio drivers.
 
> 
> the next step would be to emulate LSI SCSI chips, eh?
>