[Spice-devel] [OT] Info on netkvm usability for win7 guest on rh el 6.1

Gianluca Cecchi gianluca.cecchi at gmail.com
Fri Jul 1 02:57:34 PDT 2011


Hello,
I'm going to open an official information ticket with RH, but
eventually I can get information here too, at least for common usage.
I have rh el 6.1 hypervisor.

In "KVM Guest VM compatibility" section, the
Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-6-Virtualization-en-US guide contains:

The following URL is a complete chart showing supported operating
systems and host and guest
combinations:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/virtualization_support.html#virt_matrix

At the link I can see for the RHEL 6 64-bit x86_64 (KVM) hypervisor:
Windows 7 32-Bit x86 Optimized (5)
and (5) contains:
For best performance, the para-virtualized I/O drivers (virtio-win)
are required to be installed in the Windows(tm) guests. The drivers
are made available as images in the Supplementary channel of the RHEL
5 host OS, please refer to http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-24866
for details. Please see the Microsoft SVVP site for certification
details

unfortunately the doc seems to apply to RHEV only (that at this moment
doesn't support RH EL 6 hypervisors, btw...)
On my hypervisor I have virtio-win-1.2.0-1.el6.noarch and it seems the
latest available.
Under /usr/share/virtio-win/drivers/i386/Win7
# ll
total 32
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  7750 Apr 26 20:39 viostor.cat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  2554 Apr 26 20:39 viostor.inf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 19016 Apr 26 20:39 viostor.sys

Does this mean that using virtio for network card is not supported in
rhel 6? And that I had better not to use win2008 drivers?
So in thiscase what would be the better between the available ones:
e1000, rtl8139, ne2k_pci, pcnet?

Instead in Win2008 folders (both i386 and amd64) I see I have:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  7480 Apr 26 20:39 netkvm.cat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12691 Apr 26 20:39 netkvm.inf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 71752 Apr 26 20:39 netkvm.sys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  7766 Apr 26 20:39 viostor.cat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  2554 Apr 26 20:39 viostor.inf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 19016 Apr 26 20:39 viostor.sys

Thanks,
Gianluca


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