# Should I switch to using virtio?



## drhowarddrfine (Apr 7, 2014)

I had set up a VPS with FreeBSD10 on a Linux KVM. The host company's options were to use an Intel Pro/1000 network card or Virtio for the network card (and the drive card for that matter). On their site, I was led to believe I should select the Intel card for networking so I stayed with the default IDE interface for the drive cause I didn't have the knowledge to make the determination at the time. 

Now I have the time to look into this. Is there a reason I want to switch over to the Virtio interface now? It's only a matter of selecting it from a drop down box in the host's control panel but I don't know if I need to config or install anything on the FreeBSD side other than, I presume, rebooting.


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## scottro (Apr 7, 2014)

Hearsay, but I vaguely remember a friend working at a company supplying VPS that they were solving various network and network speed problems by using virtio.   What I do know from experience is that having a virtio disk on a KVM host--and there's a reasonable chance that the VPS supplier is using KVM--gives more flexibility, for example, the ability to add a disk on the fly, but that was with a Linux guest.  

Not sure if any of this is helpful, but for what it's worth, I do know that at least one friend who works at a place that supplies VM guests running on KVM was told to always use virtio when creating the guest.  

I don't have enough personal experience to give you anything more specific, so hope I haven't wasted your time.


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 7, 2014)

I just queried the hosting company about this and they said that, while VirtIO works for them for disk drives, they still get kernel panics but they don't know if that's what's causing occasional crashes on their side.


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## bigb89 (Apr 8, 2014)

I'm not sure if the kernel panics are related to VirtIO. Freebsd 10 has native support for the VirtIO drivers. I've switched both of my KVM VMs to use VirtIO.

My FreeBSD 9.2 is using VirtIO for both network drivers as well as the disk block drivers. For my Freebsd 10, I'm only using VirtIO for the disks (never really got around to switch the network as well), and both of have been running without any issues.

The only I think that I haven't gotten to work on FreeBSD, is to hot-add VirtIO disks. I've created this thread a while back:  http://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=45194 but haven't found a solution.

I'm able to hot-add VirtIO disks to pretty much all the other OSes out there, except FreeBSD (9 and 10). So maybe soon that will be fixed as well.


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 8, 2014)

I know I'm being lazy but why should I switch to VirtiO? I'm willing to do it and see what happens.


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