The Intel 82574 NIC has better performance and more features than the aging e1000 (aka 82540), for example MSI-X. This patch chooses it by default for the Q35 machine type.
Drivers for 82574 were added first to Linux 2.6.27 (2008) and Windows 2008 R2. This does mean that Windows 2008 will not work anymore with Q35 machine types and a default "-net nic -net xxx" network configuration; it did work before because it does have an AHCI driver. However, Windows 2008 has been declared out of main stream support in 2015. It will get out of extended support in 2020. Windows 2008 R2 has the same end of support dates and, since the two are basically Vista vs. Windows 7, R2 probably is more popular. Opinions? Paolo Paolo Bonzini (2): net: add e1000e model to the "simple" -net/-nic options q35: change default NIC to e1000e hw/i386/pc.c | 5 +++-- hw/i386/pc_piix.c | 2 +- hw/i386/pc_q35.c | 2 +- hw/pci/pci.c | 2 ++ include/hw/i386/pc.h | 2 +- 5 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) -- 2.14.3