[Spice-devel] Recommended place to get drivers

[Christophe Fergeau]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 01:42:40PM -0500, Carlos González wrote:
> First thanks all for helping in my previous thread.
> Since last answers were posted under a different thread title, I realized I
> did make a mistake in trying to mix different topics in a single thread.
> Sorry.
> 
> Back to topic, I think I'm still globally confused regarding where to get
> all needed Windows VirtIO drivers, and even which pack to use (stable or
> latest).
> 
> I think I should mention beforehand that I have used both libvirt (on
> OpenSUSE) and Proxmox VE for virtual machines. The Proxmox wiki also has a
> good amount of valuable information.
> 
> At first, I had seen there were 2 possible sources: Windows VirtIO ISO from
> the fedoraproject website, and the spice-guest-tools installer from the
> Spice website. I observed both ship the very same stuff, just different
> versions. So asked in another forum about this and was told the Fedora ISO
> usually shipped more updated versions. User said supposedly he was told
> this by a member of this mailing list...
> 
> So the way I installed drivers was through the VirtIO ISO (stable) from
> fedoraproject site. In Windows installer, in the disk selection step, I
> manually loaded all drivers: viostor, NetKVM, Balloon, vioserial, and
> qxldod; all of them under w10/amd64 directory.
> 
> However, since I was totally clueless about how to manually install the
> SPICE agent in the Windows VM (until much later, when I was able to find a
> SPICE manual...), I ended up just running the spice-guest-tools installer
> itself. Guess this overwrote many stuff...
> 
> Then I was told here in the list that, at least for the qxl-dod driver, it
> can be downloaded also from Spice website. So this would make in total 3
> possible sources for getting drivers.
> 
> Of course I'd like to try mr Ziglio's patches from the other thread to see
> if VM performance improves. And after all this background, my doubts would
> be:
> 
> --Which source is better advised to get drivers from in general?
> 
> --For the ISO case, are recent patches normally uploaded to the "latest"
> branch? Should I better use this branch generally?
> 
> --Are spice-devel and fedoraproject teams really too different? Why
> different driver versions between them?
> 

The way things flow are individual driver releases/builds (eg the
qxl-wddm-dod build you found on spice-space.org), then they are gathered
in the virtio-win iso hosted on fedora infrastructure. From the drivers
on that virtio-win iso, the spice-guest-tools installer is generated, so
right after release, the virtio-win iso and the spice-guest-tools
installer will have the exact same driver versions/binaries. However,
the spice-guest-tools executable is not updated as often as the
virtio-win iso, so they get out of sync, hence the confusion that you
describe. The process is mostly automated today, so hopefully someday
they will be much more in sync ;)

Christophe
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