Why is finding windows spice drivers so hard?

[Alon Levy]

Sorry for not making this a reply to the original (I hope the subject will be
enough), not sure how to do that. Reply inline.

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 12:04:05PM +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
> On 12/14/2010 01:39 PM, Glauber Costa wrote:
> > People,
> >
> > There is this guy - actually, a very active guy that helps us a lot in
> > terms of bug reporting and testing - in fedora-virt asking a couple of
> > questions about spice that are left unanswered.
> >
> > Can some of our spice folks take a look and it and try to give him a
> > hand?
>
> Adding spice-list
> > [fedora-virt] Why is finding windows spice drivers so hard?.eml
> >
> > Subject:
> > [fedora-virt] Why is finding windows spice drivers so hard?
> > From:
> > Tom Horsley 
> > Date:
> > Sat, 11 Dec 2010 18:09:14 -0500
> >
> > To:
> > Fedora Virt
> >
> > Is there some conspiracy to obfuscate the best place to
> > find windows guest spice drivers? People seem to invent
> > random names for the files, so you don't know if
> > it is an update of something with a old name or not.
> > Sometimes there are .iso files, sometimes .zip. Most of
> > the web pages offering downloads don't have dates,
> > so you can't tell which are the latest versions.

Enough conspiracies right now, this isn't another one.
> > Why is this so hard?
> >
> > Are the spice-space.org versions on the downloads
> > page always the best versions to grab? And if so,
> > what the heck do I actually need? I know qxl
> > is for video, but what the heck do the other
> > windows binaries actually do? Why do I want them?

Yes, spice-space.org/download.html is the canonical location.
The source repositories are hosted by freedesktop, also linked
from spice-space.org, including the qxl windows driver.

Latest windows driver is http://www.spice-space.org/download/binaries/qxl-win32-0.6.1.zip

The rest of the windows binaries:
 client - the client.
 virtio-serial driver - for agent (copy-paste, better mouse, automatic resize for full screen,
  wan performance by guest changes)
 guest agent - the agent to run in the windows guest for said features
 libraries - only required if you want to build from source. A collection of all the dependencies of
  the client (to build the driver you need only the spice-protocol and windows kernel driver stack).
> > I found a file named kvm-guest-drivers-windows-061510.iso
> > when testing a while back and it seemed to work, but
> > also seems likely to be pretty old these days.

Where is that from?
> > virt mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt

----- End forwarded message -----

[Andrew Cathrow]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alon Levy" 
> To: [e-mail]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 6:35:47 AM
> Subject: [fedora-virt] Why is finding windows spice drivers so hard?
> Sorry for not making this a reply to the original (I hope the subject
> will be
> enough), not sure how to do that. Reply inline.
>
> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 12:04:05PM +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
> > On 12/14/2010 01:39 PM, Glauber Costa wrote:
> > > People,
> > >
> > > There is this guy - actually, a very active guy that helps us a lot
> > > in
> > > terms of bug reporting and testing - in fedora-virt asking a couple
> > > of
> > > questions about spice that are left unanswered.
> > >
> > > Can some of our spice folks take a look and it and try to give him
> > > a
> > > hand?
> >
> > Adding spice-list
> > > [fedora-virt] Why is finding windows spice drivers so hard?.eml
> > >
> > > Subject:
> > > [fedora-virt] Why is finding windows spice drivers so hard?
> > > From:
> > > Tom Horsley 
> > > Date:
> > > Sat, 11 Dec 2010 18:09:14 -0500
> > >
> > > To:
> > > Fedora Virt
> > >
> > > Is there some conspiracy to obfuscate the best place to
> > > find windows guest spice drivers? People seem to invent
> > > random names for the files, so you don't know if
> > > it is an update of something with a old name or not.
> > > Sometimes there are .iso files, sometimes .zip. Most of
> > > the web pages offering downloads don't have dates,
> > > so you can't tell which are the latest versions.
>
> Enough conspiracies right now, this isn't another one.
> > > Why is this so hard?
> > >
> > > Are the spice-space.org versions on the downloads
> > > page always the best versions to grab? And if so,
> > > what the heck do I actually need? I know qxl
> > > is for video, but what the heck do the other
> > > windows binaries actually do? Why do I want them?
>
> Yes, spice-space.org/download.html is the canonical location.
> The source repositories are hosted by freedesktop, also linked
> from spice-space.org, including the qxl windows driver.
>
> Latest windows driver is
> http://www.spice-space.org/download/binaries/qxl-win32-0.6.1.zip
>
> The rest of the windows binaries:
> client - the client.
> virtio-serial driver - for agent (copy-paste, better mouse, automatic
> resize for full screen,
> wan performance by guest changes)
> guest agent - the agent to run in the windows guest for said features
> libraries - only required if you want to build from source. A
> collection of all the dependencies of
> the client (to build the driver you need only the spice-protocol and
> windows kernel driver stack).

Long term Red Hat will publish a signed, WHQL'd Spice driver for the community. There's some work we have to do first including licensing - there's some challenges involved, for example GPL is prohibited from Microsoft WHQL program so we have to jump through a few hoops.
> > > I found a file named kvm-guest-drivers-windows-061510.iso
> > > when testing a while back and it seemed to work, but
> > > also seems likely to be pretty old these days.
>
> Where is that from?
> > > virt mailing list
> > > [e-mail]
> > > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> _______________________________________________
> virt mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt

[Tom Horsley]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:35:47 +0200
Alon Levy wrote:
> The rest of the windows binaries:
>  client - the client.
>  virtio-serial driver - for agent (copy-paste, better mouse, automatic resize for full screen,
>   wan performance by guest changes)

I finally figured that out, but finding an example of the qemu
arguments required to actually create a proper virtio serial
device for the agent to use was also a major challenge. I did
finally stumble across a wiki page with an example I copied
by rote.
> guest agent - the agent to run in the windows guest for said features
>  libraries - only required if you want to build from source. A collection of all the dependencies of
>   the client (to build the driver you need only the spice-protocol and windows kernel driver stack).
> > > I found a file named kvm-guest-drivers-windows-061510.iso
> > > when testing a while back and it seemed to work, but
> > > also seems likely to be pretty old these days.
>
> Where is that from?

There was a fedora 13 directory I found a pointer to somewhere:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/alt/virtio-win/13/images/bin/

There is a similar directory with a '14' instead of a '13', but
it didn't seem to contain any drivers :-).

[Justin Forbes]

On Wed, 2010-12-15 at 07:33 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:35:47 +0200
> Alon Levy wrote:
> > The rest of the windows binaries:
> >  client - the client.
> >  virtio-serial driver - for agent (copy-paste, better mouse, automatic resize for full screen,
> >   wan performance by guest changes)
>
> I finally figured that out, but finding an example of the qemu
> arguments required to actually create a proper virtio serial
> device for the agent to use was also a major challenge. I did
> finally stumble across a wiki page with an example I copied
> by rote.
> > guest agent - the agent to run in the windows guest for said features
> >  libraries - only required if you want to build from source. A collection of all the dependencies of
> >   the client (to build the driver you need only the spice-protocol and windows kernel driver stack).
> > > > I found a file named kvm-guest-drivers-windows-061510.iso
> > > > when testing a while back and it seemed to work, but
> > > > also seems likely to be pretty old these days.
> >
> > Where is that from?
>
> There was a fedora 13 directory I found a pointer to somewhere:
>
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/alt/virtio-win/13/images/bin/
>
> There is a similar directory with a '14' instead of a '13', but
> it didn't seem to contain any drivers :-).

The 14 directory does indeed contain drivers, virtio-win-1.1.11-0.iso.

Justin

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 07:33:29AM -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:35:47 +0200
> Alon Levy wrote:
> > The rest of the windows binaries:
> >  client - the client.
> >  virtio-serial driver - for agent (copy-paste, better mouse, automatic resize for full screen,
> >   wan performance by guest changes)
>
> I finally figured that out, but finding an example of the qemu
> arguments required to actually create a proper virtio serial
> device for the agent to use was also a major challenge. I did
> finally stumble across a wiki page with an example I copied
> by rote.

In latest libvirt (not in Fedora 14 I don't think) you should be able
to add:

<graphics type='spice' port='-1' tlsPort='-1' autoport='yes'
            listen='127.0.0.1' />

http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsGraphics

Rich.