Virtio Driver Crashing High Load

DragonHoc

Renowned Member
Mar 9, 2016
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Running Windows Server 2016 and using the Virtio network interface. Under high network through put the network driver will suddenly disable itself in device manager.

Is there any fix for this?
 
Hi,

these problems are mostly windows driver problems.
I would recommend you to use always the latest driver, not the stable one.
 
Hello,
I recognized the same error on a windows2012r2 vm. Then i switched from the latest 149 driver to the stable 141 driver and the problems are gone!
 
using driver 149 and NetKVM this is quiet eash to replicate. Just install iperf3 in the vm and run it as iperf server

Code:
iperf3.exe -s

Turn the windows firewall off (or allow port 5201 tcp)

Then on another machine (i just used the proxmox host) again install iperf3 and run
Code:
iperf3 -c 192.0.2.2 -w 130k -P 4 -t 60

It will choke and stop sending data pretty quickly

I tried turning all forms of offloading off in the windows network interface properties but this made no difference.

Gong back to 141 (stable) seems to have fixed it for me.

Note that you have to go to device manager, right click on the device to get properties then uninstall the driver. I then went to the mounted iso for 141 found the NetKVM/2k16/amd64 folder, right clicked on netkvm.inf and clicked install. Then went back to device manager, clicked action, then "scan for hardware change". The VirtiIO Ethernet Adapter reappeared, i then checked its properties to confirm it was running 141. then did a complete shutdown and start up to make sure that the qemu/kvm process was fresh. Note that the network adapters advanced settings are default (ie offloading are all on)

This seems to have fixed it for me

I will say that 141 is much lower throughput than 149 (2Gbit/s versus 10Gbit/s) - however it continues to work which is much higher throughput than seizing up.
 
Hello,

I tested the issue with the latest 0.1.160 driver.

For me the problem is gone and i can achieve a steady iperf3 throughput of 6.5 Gbit/s.

kind regards
hodo
 

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