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

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 11:57 +0200, Gianluca Cecchi wrote:
> 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
<snip>
It has been well over a year since we tested them side by side but, when
we did, the e1000 driver outperformed the virtio driver to our great
surprise. I do not know if that is still the case - John