Xen emulated network cards (was Re: FreeBSD HVM guests?)

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Tue, 12 May 2009, Christoph Egger wrote:
> > In your experience, is the slowdown due to HVM unnaceptable? Out of
> > curiosity, could the ne2000 emulated device saturate even a 100mbit link
> > (I'm running on gigabit) ?
>
> Append
>
> , model=e1000
>
> in the vif line to get an emulated Intel e1000 device.
> This chip features highlevel commands whichs makes its emulation
> cheaper from performance point of view.

I've got:
vif = [ 'bridge=bridge0, type=ioemu, model=e1000' ]

But the domain does not start up and I get "qemu: Unsupported NIC: e1000"
in qemu-dm.XXX.log

I guess this is because I am using xen 3.1.4 (due to a need to run i386 
dom0 on 5.0).

The qemu 0.9.1 man page says:
Qemu can emulate several different models of network card.  Valid values for 
type are "i82551", "i82557b", "i82559er", "ne2k_pci", "ne2k_isa", "pcnet", 
"rtl8139", "smc91c111", "lance" and "mcf_fec".

I guess any of these are potential alternatives to e1000 on xen 3.1.4, but 
are any of them any better than ne2k_pci?

--
Stephen