virtio-win drivers

Justin M. Forbes jmforbes at linuxtx.org
Thu Jan 14 16:30:45 UTC 2010


The Windows drivers required to install using kvm virtio have not been
included in previous Fedora releases.  This is a serious omission, in
that virtio makes a noticeable performance difference for the guest.
While it is understood that packaging up an ISO of binary drivers for
Windows which koji cannot build is not acceptable for the fedora
repositories, we have a problem in that we need drivers which are known
to work with a given Fedora release.  A possible solution is to have
virt-install or virt-manager download the ISO if it is not already
present on the host.  The ISO is only around 4MB, so this shouldn't be
too big of an issue.

In order to make this work, and know that we are getting drivers that
should work with Fedora, we really need a place to host the "officially
supported" virtio-win drivers for Fedora.  The drivers themselves are
open source, GPL license applies.  The only blocker from the real
repositories is the fact that koji cannot build them.  We are asking the
board for approval and possibly a hosting location for these drivers so
that they can be supported in the Fedora space.  Would this be a
possibility?

Thanks,
Justin




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