virtio-net and opensolaris network adapter drivers?

[loomy]

Is opensolaris the first class citizen that can run network operations as virtualbox guest with low CPU usage? How do you make this happen?

[loomy]

the manual has the answer to my question: NO.

The “Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net)“ is special. If you select this,
then VirtualBox does not virtualize common networking hardware (that is supported
by common guest operating systems out of the box). Instead, VirtualBox then expects
a special software interface for virtualized environments to be provided by the
guest, thus avoiding the complexity of emulating networking hardware and improving
network performance. Starting with version 3.1, VirtualBox provides support for the
industry-standard “virtio” networking drivers, which are part of the open-source KVM
project.

The “virtio” networking drivers are available for the following guest operating systems:

- Linux kernels version 2.6.25 or later can be con?gured to provide virtio support;
some distributions also back-ported virtio to older kernels.
- For Windows 2000, XP and Vista, virtio drivers can be downloaded and installed
from the KVM project web page.

But it is not the fault of virtualbox that opensolaris does not support this. Only the fault of opensolaris.