[fedora-virt] Why is finding windows spice drivers so hard?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 06:09:14PM -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> Is there some conspiracy to obfuscate the best place to
> find windows guest spice drivers? People seem to invent
> random names for the files, so you don't know if
> it is an update of something with a old name or not.
> Sometimes there are .iso files, sometimes .zip. Most of
> the web pages offering downloads don't have dates,
> so you can't tell which are the latest versions.

Not sure about conspiracies, but I can tell you what the plan is in
future.

We want to build the spice Windows drivers on Fedora (as Fedora
packages, using Koji etc) using the Windows cross-compiler
toolchain[1].  They will be available, versioned, as regular Fedora
packages that you can install on the host, plus some scripts around
that to make installing them into the guest easy.

These packages will be signed but not WHQL'd so you will have to make
a small registry edit in your Windows guest in order to install them.
You can use virt-win-reg[2] to do that in an automated way.  (One
thing you can do to help is to publish the precise method to do this --
I know it's possible, but haven't worked out the details).

Unfortunately we're not quite there with some things at the moment
although we have hired someone who starts early next year to help
implement this.  In particular we need 64 bit support in the
cross-compiler toolchain, which has been stuck forever on some legal
stuff.

Rich.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW
[2] http://libguestfs.org/virt-win-reg.1.html

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