Alexsei and all, Well, I screwed up and responded to Aleksei directly instead of to the list. I really do appreciate his help; he's a lot more knowledgeable than I am in this area. In an attempt to catch up on this, here's what's happened.
I tried loading virtio_net module; it also loaded the virtio and virtio_ring modules, but no luck. Still no device in Debian. Aleksei also recommended trying to load the virtio_mmio, but it does not exist on my system. My /etc/network/interfaces file contains the default: # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp Again, this setup is: Windows 7 as the base OS with two nics, wired and wireless (only one active at a time). Under this I have Oracle Virtual Machine running Ubuntu 4.4.0-38-generic (latest stable release). I have set up a bridge in Ubuntu's Network Manager as described on http://ask.xmodulo.com/configure-linux-bridge-network-manager-ubuntu.html. The bridge is defined as "bridge0" and works correctly in Ubuntu. I start QEMU under Ubuntu with: qemu-system-arm -m 1024M \ -sd /export/armhf.qcow2 \ -M vexpress-a9 \ -cpu cortex-a9 \ -kernel /export/boot/vmlinuz \ -initrd /export/boot/initrd.img \ -append "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2" \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev bridge,br=bridge0,id=net0,helper=/usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper Guest system is Debian 3.2.0-4-vexpress, again the latest stable version. I get a SLIRP connection just fine when I don't specify the -device and -netdev parameters. The "lshw" shows the driver to be smsc911x, but I don't know how to relate that to which NIC is being emulated (it at least works). When I do specify the -device and -netdev parameters, I get no network. The log shows nothing unusual other than no network device is found. I'm also going to ask in the qemu-arm forum, just in case there's a known problem there. But I would appreciate any other help and ideas from Aleksei and others. Hopefully this catch-up will jog someone's memory. Thanks again for everyone's help, especially Aleksei. Jerry