The Linux nbd driver recently increased the maximum supported request
size up to 32 MB:

  commit 078be02b80359a541928c899c2631f39628f56df
  Author: Michal Belczyk <belczyk@bsd.krakow.pl>
  Date:   Tue Apr 30 15:28:28 2013 -0700

      nbd: increase default and max request sizes

      Raise the default max request size for nbd to 128KB (from 127KB) to get it
      4KB aligned.  This patch also allows the max request size to be increased
      (via /sys/block/nbd<x>/queue/max_sectors_kb) to 32MB.

QEMU's 1 MB buffers are too small to handle these requests.

This patch allocates data buffers dynamically and allows up to 32 MB per
request.

Reported-by: Nick Thomas <nick@bytemark.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>