Fedora Windows Spice/Virtio KVM drivers and tools (was Re: Red Hat QXL GPU Driver for Windows 7?)

[Simone Caronni]

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
- Updated every once in a while

http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/

2) Roughly the same versions of Fedora, in zip format
- No WHQL, no changelog, no QXL drivers, no Spice Agent but the changelog
available.
- All the changelog points to an internal Redhat git repository.
- From my understanding, these tarballs are the one that every once in a
while make their way into the Fedora iso and the "pre WHQL" Redhat ones.
- The source is there in a zip file.

http://people.redhat.com/vrozenfe/

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:
- Latest Fedora iso drivers
- Recent built from source QXL driver, but unfortunately unsigned so it
doesn't work properly in Fedora.
- The Balloon Service is not installed as part of the setup

http://spice-space.org/download/binaries/spice-guest-tools/

5) Official RHEL drivers (need an account for this)
- virtio-win-1.5.3-1.el6_3.noarch.rpm
- Contains signed and WHQL drivers for everything.
- Always a bit older than the Fedora ones.
- Follows the same numbering and logs as no. 2.
- Contains signed WHQL drivers for Windows XP and Windows 7 32/64 bits, but
outside of the normal iso (why?)
- Does not contain the Spice Agent.

6) Yan Vugenfirer's repository
- Contains only source, and is public.
- Does not match with Fedora or RHEL provided drivers.
- Contains only the Virtio drivers, no Spice Agent or QXL driver.

https://github.com/YanVugenfirer/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/commits/master

7) QXL drivers for various targets
- Sometime, someone builds an updated driver and posts it to the
spice-devel mailing list.
- All the drivers are not signed, of course.

======

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.

Before this, I used to compile drivers myself with the DDK following the
instructions. This gave me the option to compile the QXL drivers for
Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 targets as well, but I always had the same
problems with signing.

======

Since all the problems go back to signing the binaries for making them work
out of the box in Windows Vista/7/2008/2008r2/8, I would like to know if
it's possible to do this from time to time:

- 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.
- Pack everything into an iso.

I'm not asking for WHQL as I understand this is a "benefit" for the Redhat
subscriptions.
All the bits are there except they are dispersed everywhere, so I don't
think it's a big effort.

Regards,
--Simone



-- 
You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of
the shore (R. W. Emerson).
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