On Tue, 2012-01-03 at 13:12 +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Dor Laor <dl...@redhat.com> wrote: > > On 01/03/2012 10:33 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > >> > >> On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 01:09:40PM +0100, Juan Quintela wrote: > >>> > >>> Please send in any agenda items you are interested in covering. > >> > >> > >> Status of virtio drivers for Windows: > >> * Unsupported in community today > > > > > > Why? > > Because there is no one around to answer questions or look into bugs > in a timely manner. > > I'm not saying that virtio Windows drivers are unsupported, I'm saying > that the _QEMU community_ isn't supporting them if you look at the > mailing list and bug tracker activity. Perhaps we should direct > questions about the virtio drivers to some place? I've already been > CCing and bouncing questions from users to Vadim for several months. > > >> * Bugs languish on bug tracker/mailing list > > > > > > There are 1.2 developers on them and Vadim does the enlightenment support > > for kvm too. I don't see plenty of issues that are currently actively, open, > > can you point us to such? > > Yes, this is exactly the point. Vadim is doing a great job but he's > only 1 person. Having 1.2 people that handle virtio Windows driver > means the bus factor is dangerous and we cannot scale. > > The bug that brought this to mind again: > https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/818673 > > Another email thread on virtio-balloon driver issues (looks unsolved): > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2011-10/msg01240.html > > > There is a legal issue w/ WHQL drivers but self sign is not a probably and I > > believe that's what we have today. > > For a user anything other than first-class native drivers is a red > flag that this software may work poorly - on modern Windows that means > properly signed drivers. > > Although signing might seem like a secondary issue I think it's what > actually has stopped us from growing a community around the virtio > Windows drivers. There are very few people who can help because a > development environment where you can only contribute patches but not > build the code fully takes the fun away. > > Basically I'm asking: is there a way we can do the virtio Windows > driver development more in public, in the community, so that we will > grow stronger in KVM Windows guest support? > More QA resources for WHQL testing against upstream QEMU and KVM, and different distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. And one more Software Engineer/Software Engineer In Test who will be in touch with community.
Cheers, Vadim. > How do we bootstrap this into more than 1.2 people who can hack on and > help with guest drivers? > > My suggestions are for those already involved to actively join IRC, > mailing list, and bug tracker so they can pass on their knowledge and > watch for questions. Also, if there are known bugs and TODOs then > please post them so folks with time and interest can help get them > fixed. > > Stefan
