virtio-win drivers

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 10:13:02AM -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> Paul W. Frields said the following on 01/14/2010 10:09 AM Pacific Time:
> > On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:01:25AM -0600, Matt Domsch wrote:
> >> On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 10:30:45AM -0600, Justin M. Forbes wrote:
> >>> 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?
> >>
> >>
> >> <board_hat>
> >> I'm not opposed, but such storage requests should be made to
> >> Infrastructure.
> >> </board_hat>
> >>
> >> <infrastructure_hat>
> >> We have space available (mirrored or not).  Please fill out a Request
> >> for Resources ticket, including space needed (plan for multiple
> >> releases and OS targets over time), duration, frequency of updates,
> >> and any guesstimate on how many downloads are expected.  The latter
> >> will help decide if we need to put this on the mirrors, or not.
> >> </infrastructure_hat>
> >
> > Can someone clarify the issue for the Board here?
> >

The issue for the board was the creation of another supported distribution
path for a piece of supported Fedora software.

> 
> Is it one of our existing written policies that we only provide content 
> built by Koji?  I'm curious if anyone knows if/where we state that.
> 

That was what I was told when I originally inquired.  The RHEL distribution
method is to have the ISO in an rpm available from the repository.  This
would certainly be easier because it would not require different hacks to
deal with Fedora vs. RHEL.  Essentially from a koji perspective, this is
packaging a binary file for distribution, but in this case the binary files
are GPLed, and just have to be built on Windows.

Justin