On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 04:39:06PM +0100, Simone Caronni wrote:
Spinning of from this, I think there is some mess around the Virtio
drivers; I would be glad if someone could explain that to me.
Sorry for the length of this mail but I could not shorten it.
Let's say I would like to grab the latest virtio drivers and tools for my
Windows guest and the accompanying source code; this is what I found:
1) Recent version from Fedora in iso format
- No WHQL, no changelog, no QXL drivers, no Spice Agent available, no source
Err, there are sources, see
http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/src/
3) Official Spice Agent (very old and buggy):
http://spice-space.org/download/binaries/vdagent-win32_20111124.zip
4) Spice Guest Tools setup
- Unofficial Spice Agent, built from the latest sources using the mingw
based package:
I'd tend to consider this agent as an official build, though it probably
needs to be put in a zip file next to the older build.
======
So far, my best setup is to recreate an iso everytime there is an update to
the following:
- Latest Fedora drivers for Windows XP, 2003
- Latest QXL binary from the Spice Guest Tools for Windows XP
- Latest signed RHEL drivers for Windows Vista and up
- Latest signed QXL driver for Windows Vista and up
- Latest Spice Agent binary from the Spice Guest Tools
I would say this is suboptimal, especially when I try to explain someone
moving from Windows that si trying to virtualize Windows on their newly
converted laptop.
At the best case, they don't have the QXL driver, causing lag in the
desktop, no Spice Agent for cut&paste and usually a lot of problems with
Windows 7.
For this use case, all they need to do is to grab the spice-guest-tools
installer and run that, the mess you describe is the exact reason why I'm
building this installer.
- Have Fedora build the latest Virtio drivers (this is already done)
- Build also the Spice Agent for 32/64 bit (this is done at
spice-space.orgas part of the Spice Guest Tools)
- Build the latest QXL drivers for all the Windows targets supported by the
Virtio drivers (I know the Windows 8 XWDM driver will come eventually later)
- Sign everything with the Redhat key, as it's doing for the drivers at
point 2.
Hmm I thought each binary driver release was signed with the Red Hat key
(but not WHQL'ed), maybe I missed something...
- Pack everything into an iso.
Is that better than having an installer for everything (aka
spice-guest-tools)?
Christophe