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

[Christophe Fergeau]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 04:39:06PM +0100, Simone Caronni wrote:
> 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

Err, there are sources, see
http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/src/

> 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:

I'd tend to consider this agent as an official build, though it probably
needs to be put in a zip file next to the older build.

> ======
> 
> 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.

For this use case, all they need to do is to grab the spice-guest-tools
installer and run that, the mess you describe is the exact reason why I'm
building this installer. 

> - 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.

Hmm I thought each binary driver release was signed with the Red Hat key
(but not WHQL'ed), maybe I missed something...

> - Pack everything into an iso.

Is that better than having an installer for everything (aka
spice-guest-tools)?

Christophe
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