[Libosinfo] New virtio-win repo and isos

[Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)]

On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 05/06/2015 09:57 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
>> On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 6:34 PM, Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> On 05/05/2015 08:12 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
>>>> On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 11:37 PM, Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hey all,
>>>>
>>>> Hi Cole,
>>>>
>>>>> Wanted to give a heads up about a new repo with virtio-win RPMs. Isos are
>>>>> still available for direct download, just at a different URL. All the details
>>>>> are here:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Windows_Virtio_Drivers
>>>>>
>>>>> FWIW the rpm and iso now match the layout of what we ship with RHEL, and match
>>>>> the content (except still no WHQL signature).
>>>>
>>>> Thats really awesome. Thanks for working on this.
>>>>
>>>>> Not sure how interesting it is to libosinfo/boxes in its current form.
>>>>> But
>>>>> it's a fresh base to start from if you have any ideas or suggestions about how
>>>>> to improve things in this area.
>>>>
>>>> Well it would be really good to have all drivers files available in
>>>> unpacked form at a canonical location (than zeenix.fedorapeople.org).
>>>> If you could make that happen, that would be very helpful. Currently I
>>>> manually unpack the latest ISO and upload the driver files to my
>>>> personal webspace and then update the libosinfo db. So a lot of manual
>>>> work and I tend to forget about such tasks and hence the reason you'd
>>>> find drivers we currently use in libosinfo are a bit old.
>>>>
>>>
>>> So looks like the only drivers you need there are the virtio-block bits,
>>> though we should probably expose virtio-scsi as well since it seems storage is
>>> the only bit that's needed (virt-v2v has similar requirements though they get
>>> the drivers from /usr/share via the virtio-win RPM). Exposing those extracted
>>> bits should be easy enough. Can you file a bug at Product=Virtualization Tools
>>>  Component=virtio-win ?
>>
>> Done: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1219042
>>
>>> However I'd suggest libosinfo still controls the URL, even if it's just a
>>> redirect to the new bits. And I would also suggest that the URL only points at
>>> known tested versions, since it's plausible the automated builds could be
>>> completely busted sometimes, they will often hit the public repo before anyone
>>> but the developer has tested them
>>
>> Hm.. true but can't you separate the tested ones from completely
>> untested newly build ones on http://alt.fedoraproject.org itself? The
>> thing is being incharge on the whole thing, you'd be far less likely

I'm hoping you guessed that I meant to write "more likely" here.

>> to notice new versions available (and also be the best judge of which
>> ones can and cant be marked as stable/tested). Also we don't currently
>> have any canonical location for these drivers.
>>
>
> Check the fedora wiki page, we do have links for stable vs. latest. Stable

Ah sorry, I'm blind sometimes.

> points to the build that roughly correlates with what was shipped with the
> latest public RHEL release, so they should be reasonably trustworthy. But I
> say reasonably because I don't think RHEL QE is testing libosinfo autoinstall
> or anything
>
> However... I want to avoid this situation:
>
> - stable link is updated
> - boxes installs are now busted for, say, winxp
> - panic ensues, much scrambling to get the bug fixed and update the stable/ link
>
> If instead libosinfo/boxes had its own stable link like libosinfo.org/virtio,
> it could point to the virtio-win stable/ link by default, but if a nasty
> regression is found, you could change libosinfo.org/virtio to point back to
> the old working repo while we wait for an update

Sounds good but

1. I think we'll need Daniel's help to setup this webspace on libosinfo.org.
2. I'm guessing this would mean you'd keep hosting at least the last
stable release of drivers?

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
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