KVM Guest Drivers for Windows 2018

By
rck
-
kvm

KVM Guest Drivers for Windows 2018

Overview

This page describes how to obtain and use virtio drivers for Windows virtual machines running on KVM, and additional software agents for Windows VMs.

Yum|Dnf Repo

There are a yum|dnf repo shipping ‘virtio-win’ RPMs. The RPMs install driver binaries and agent installers on your host machine into /usr/share. These bits can then be shared with Windows VMs.

Install the repo file:

sudo wget  https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/virtio-win.repo</a> -O /etc/yum.repos.d/virtio-win.repo

Then install the virtio-win package with DNF or YUM:

sudo dnf install virtio-win
sudo yum install virtio-win

The .repo file provides two different repositories:

  • virtio-win-stable
    • This provides builds of virtio-win that roughly correlates to what was shipped with the most recent RHEL release, meaning they have received a decent chunk of testing.
    • This repo is enabled by default.
  • virtio-win-latest
    • This provides the latest driver builds. They may be development quality, or bug free, or complete broken. Caveat emptor 🙂
    • This repo is disabled by default. If you want to update from virtio-win-stable to the latest bits, do: sudo yum --enablerepo=virtio-win-latest update virtio-win

or with dnf: sudo dnf --enablerepo=virtio-win-latest upgrade virtio-win

RPM contents

  • /usr/share/virtio-win/*.iso: ISO CDROM containing all the drivers. See details below
  • /usr/share/virtio-win/*.vfd: VFD floppy images for using during install of Windows XP
  • /usr/share/virtio-win/drivers: Copy of the extracted VFD driver contents
  • /usr/share/guest-agent/*.msi: QEMU Guest Agent 32bit and 64bit MSI installers

ISO contents

The .iso contains the following bits:

  • NetKVM/: Virtio Network driver
  • viostor/: Virtio Block driver
  • vioscsi/: Virtio SCSI driver
  • viorng/: Virtio RNG driver
  • vioser/: Virtio serial driver
  • Balloon/: Virtio Memory Balloon driver
  • qxl/: QXL graphics driver for Windows 7 and earlier. (build virtio-win-0.1.103-1 and later)
  • qxldod/: QXL graphics driver for Windows 8 and later. (build virtio-win-0.1.103-2 and later)
  • pvpanic/: QEMU pvpanic device driver (build virtio-win-0.1.103-2 and later)
  • guest-agent/: QEMU Guest Agent 32bit and 64bit MSI installers
  • qemupciserial/: QEMU PCI serial device driver
  • *.vfd: VFD floppy images for using during install of Windows XP

Direct download

Direct downloads are available for the .iso, .vfd, and qemu-ga installers.

If you previously used isos from alt.fedoraproject.org, note that these new isos have a different file layout (matching RHEL isos). If you need to access the old isos you can do so here. However these isos are deprecated and only kept around for back compatability. No new isos will be added there.

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