[Libosinfo] New virtio-win repo and isos

[Cole Robinson]

On 05/11/2015 04:17 AM, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> On Fri, May 01, 2015 at 06:37:36PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> 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
> 
> Ah cool, thanks for the heads up!
> 
> Couple of comments:
> - the stable version is -0.96, the latest one is -0.103.
>   alt.fedoraproject.org had -0.100 I assume this was not considered
>   stable?

The stable/ name is really only 'this is the latest version that shipped with
the latest RHEL release'. It has a higher stability guarantee because the bits
passed RH QE, but beyond that you have to look at the actual build changes to
judge whether later builds are less trust worthy.

In this case, I think build -100 had a few additional bug fixes but not any
major changes, so it should be reliable, but it doesn't strictly meet the
'stable' definition I listed above.

> - any reason not to ship SPICE vdagent while shipping the QXL driver?

For starters we just duplicated RHEL content, and historically RHEL hasn't
shipped it. There's a few internal bugs I included you on where it's being
discussed. But mostly I think it's a case of 'nobody made it happen yet'.

(It may make sense to diverge the RHEL and Fedora bits at some point, but only
after an explicit discussion)

> - has there been any testing of the qxldod driver? My understanding is
>   that it's still a bit young (but wider exposure/testing is probably
>   good at this point).
> 

It has had some RH QE testing, and I know some users have been consuming the
builds that vadim has published on his people page. But it hasn't been
submitted to WHQL yet or shipped in a RHEL release, and there's no clear
timeline when that will be. So it's still very much pre-release state. That
said if people want to give it a shot and report issues, it might help move
things along, it's under active development

>> FWIW the rpm and iso now match the layout of what we ship with RHEL, and match
>> the content (except still no WHQL signature).
> 
> The QXL driver should have a WHQL signature, do you know if that is the
> case? The latest builds uploaded to spice-space.org did have the WHQL
> signature.
> 

My scripts are set up to watch for and consume internal prewhql builds for
qxl, not the spice-space content. That probably explains the discrepancy.

>> The most obvious bit is keying in spice-guest-tools to this. Is
>> spice-guest-tools buildable with mingw? Generating a new spice-guest-tools
>> with every virtio-win build would be pretty cool
> 
> Once you have all the drivers/agent binaries, the installer by itself
> can be built on a linux box with mingw32-nsis. Fetching the
> drivers/putting them in the right directory structure is still half
> manual/half automated at this point, so a bit more work might be needed,
> but this should definitely be doable. Tracking new vdagent releases/QXL
> releases might need to be done manually though. Well, we'll see, all in
> all, interesting idea ;)
> 

Rearranging files is about 80% of the iso/rpm build process anyways, so
hopefully it's not much more work to have my scripts spit out the needed
spice-guest-tools layout as well. Do you have a description of the file
layout, or a pointer to the code that moves the files around?

Thanks,
Cole