virtio-win drivers

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 01:26:02PM -0500, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I'm very very very uncomfortable with permitting content into Fedora
> that isn't built via Koji.
> 
> Why can't koji build these drivers? Do they depend on Windows bits to
> build? If so, they're almost certainly not license acceptable for Fedora.

Browsing over this very old thread ...

I tried building the virtio win drivers using our cross-compiler[1],
after all, that's what it's for!

It is nearly possible to build it, but there are several technical
problems, missing bits of the header files.  Organizationally it's
hard to even locate and download the sources to these drivers.

Furthermore although we could do a bit of work and compile them from
source in Koji, we cannot sign them (a process that Microsoft calls
WHQL), and unsigned drivers are less than useful in reality for
Windoze users.

So that's the situation.  I hope this is enlightening, even if it's a
bit of a late reply.

Rich.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/MinGW

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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