My machine has an Intel e1000 1Gbps NIC. I install the latest Linux system on it, and use KVM as the hypervisor to run a VM. The Guest OS is Windows XP. I use PCI passthrough to pass e1000 NIC to the VM, so Windows XP can directly use this physical NIC and should has higher performance.
I successfully install Intel PRO/1000 PT driver in XP. It can work, and the performance is not bad. However, if I reboot XP, the strange thing happens. Just after reboot, the NIC can be used. But if I run some other programs with some IO traffic, no data can be transferred via this NIC from then on. There are no abnormal information in event logs, and in device manager, there are no warnings or errors in Intel PRO/1000 PT driver. Why doesn't Intel e1000 NIC work correctly after reboot?
Another strange thing. If I re-install PRO/1000 PT driver, the NIC can be used again, even if I run some other programs with some IO traffic. That is to say, after I reboot the Guest OS, I must re-install the NIC driver each time, otherwise the NIC can't work.
Who knows the reason of e1000 NIC behavior in KVM Windows environment? Thanks a lot!
