[vbox-dev] FW: Re: [VBox-users] Predictable PCI bus addresses for network interfaces?

[Kent R. Spillner]

> Of course. The PCI bus addresses for each PCI device in VirtualBox are
> 100% deterministic, and only switching to a different chipset type
> (which we don't encourage, as ICH9 is marked as experimental) will
> select a different (again 100% deterministic) mapping.

Great, thank you!  I really appreciate this information, especially the pointer to the source. :)

> No idea how you came to the conclusion that the first NIC is bus 0/dev
> 17, as this is what the 6th NIC will get. The fist NIC is bus 0/dev 3,
> unless someone knows the magic tricks to enable compatibility with
> VMware, which puts its first NIC at bus 0/dev 11.

Perhaps I'm reading the PCI address wrong?  I just confirmed this on two separate Linux guests both using the PIIX3 chipset, but with only a single network adapter:

# lspci | grep Ethernet
00:11.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) (rev 02)

That bus address is in hex, correct?  So I read that as "bus 0 dev 17 function 0."  I don't believe I performed any magic tricks to enable VMware compat, but I am running the stock VirtualBox 4.2.16 packages for Arch (https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/virtualbox/).