virtio-win drivers

[Chris Tyler]

On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 13:09 -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 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?
> 

I see two issues:

(1) Do we want to include software targeted for another OS and which
cannot be built using our tools (e.g., Koji), as a package in Fedora?

(2) Otherwise, do we want a Fedora package (virt-install/virt-manager)
to go and automatically grab software (virtio ISO) which is not
considered acceptable as a Fedora package?


It seems to me that some of this discussion will overlap heavily with
the mingw package discussion from July 2008 (start of thread here:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2008-July/msg00004.html)

At present, the mingw32-* packages are in Fedora, and they FTBFS
(http://linux.dell.com/files/fedora/FixBuildRequires/).

-Chris