[Ovirt-devel] [PATCH ovirt-appliance] use virtio_net in appliance

[Alan Pevec]

Chris Lalancette wrote:
> Alan Pevec wrote:
>> cannot use virtio_net for "fake" Nodes:
>>   "No valid PXE rom found for network device"
> 
> Ah yes, that's a problem.  I thought there was some work with gPXE to get this
> to work, but I'm not sure where that is.  In any case, doing virtio on the
> appliance itself is a good idea, so ACK to that.

Yeah, it helps at lot, at least in my setup, I was getting <1MB/s with emulated 8139 and 50MB/s with virtio_net, scp from host to the appliance.

Last message on kvm list about including pxe-virtio is http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg02497.html
gPXE actually includes the same Etherboot legacy driver
http://etherboot.org/wiki/soc/2008/stefanha/journal/week10?s[]=virtio#wed_30_jul

I generated Etherboot ROM image at rom-o-matic.net, put it in /usr/share/kvm/ and PXE boot with virtio just worked, so I asked kvm RPM maintainers to include and build pxe-virtio.bin.
Other option would be to have ROM images in pxe-kvm package, built from separate etherboot source package, like Ubuntu.