This bug is a temporary workaround for RHOS 2.1 release until a longer term solution can be implemented to use virtio drivers as part of bug # 865345 The global default for NIC should be changed to e1000 from rtl. This will provide better performance, at the expense of support for Windows XP guests (which is out of support anyhow) In a future release we would ideally use a combination of libosinfo and libguestfs to determine based on the image type (storage as image metadata in glance perhaps) and based on whether or not the correct drivers are installed (via libguestfs probing) which network driver to optimally use.
This seems to be a tweak in the nova.conf that comes with our rpms. Assigning to Martin to do the nova.conf we ship as a SOURCE in our RPMs.
Given that Nova already hardcodes use of virtio for disks, defaulting to virtio for networking too leaves us no worse off in terms of guest OS compat. This should also be done upstream, not in a RH specific patch.
Changing subject from e1000 to virtio, on the basis that we already have a hardcoded requirement for virtio.
(In reply to comment #2) > Given that Nova already hardcodes use of virtio for disks, defaulting to > virtio for networking too leaves us no worse off in terms of guest OS > compat. This should also be done upstream, not in a RH specific patch. Re: virtio for disks, I filed bug # 887910 to track that separately. I agree though, that unless we address the block device issue, it makes no sense to address the NIC issue. Also agree wrt upstream. If we're going to change the defaults in RHOS, they should be changed in Fedora/EPEL OpenStack as well.
Patch posted upstream to default to virtio for KVM/QEMU https://review.openstack.org/#/c/18233/
We'll take danpb's patch in Comment #5 to make the default virtio NICs, but accelerate fix to allow manual override of the drivers on a per guest basis so that we allow for images that don't have virtio drivers. That will become the focus of bug # 865345
Tests on openstack-nova-network-2012.2.2-5.el6ost.noarch Default Nic is virtio ( checked both on lspci on VM and qeum on host )
*** Bug 901596 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Since the problem described in this bug report should be resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated files, follow the link below. If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-0208.html