[Libosinfo] New virtio-win repo and isos

[Cole Robinson]

On 05/07/2015 08:41 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> 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.

You could even continue to use zeenix.fedorapeople.org now as well and use
.htaccess for redirects

> 2. I'm guessing this would mean you'd keep hosting at least the last
> stable release of drivers?
> 

Yeah we will keep permanent links around here:

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/archive-virtio/

So stable/ and latest/ will change where they point, but the archive links
will always be stable

- Cole