virtio-win drivers

[Dennis Gilmore]

On Thursday 14 January 2010 01:05:20 pm John Poelstra wrote:
> Dennis Gilmore said the following on 01/14/2010 10:46 AM Pacific Time:
> > On Thursday 14 January 2010 10:30:45 am 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?
> >> 
> >> Thanks,
> >> Justin
> > 
> > This is not a board issue.  If we can not build it in fedora then we can
> > not ship it period.  you are free to host it on your fedorapeople space
> > and document how to get it.  Best thing to do would be for the upstream
> > project to host the iso and make it available for download.
> 
> Where do we explicitly tell people this this is our policy (setting
> aside how "obvious" it might be to some).  If someone is asking for an
> exception to our stated policies as a project it is an issue that the
> board or FESCo needs to address and we owe a clear response to.
> 

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#No_inclusion_of_pre-
built_binaries_or_libraries

so it doesn't say it has to be built in koji but we explicitly state that you 
cant use pre built binaries except for bootstrapping.  with an exception for 
firmware.   I don't think we can class windows drivers as firmware. 


Again its not a board issue it would be an issue for FESCo and the packaging 
committee to resolve.

Dennis
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