Windows VirtIO Drivers
Introduction
VirtIO Drivers are paravirtualized drivers for kvm/Linux (see http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Virtio). In short, they enable direct (paravirtualized) access to devices and peripherals for virtual machines using them, instead of slower, emulated, ones.
A quite extended explanation about VirtIO drivers can be found here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-virtio.
At the moment these kind of devices are supported:
- block (disks drives), see Paravirtualized Block Drivers for Windows
- network (ethernet cards), see Paravirtualized Network Drivers for Windows
- balloon (dynamic memory management), see Dynamic Memory Management
You can maximize performances by using VirtIO drivers. The availability and status of the VirtIO drivers depends on the guest OS and platform.
Windows OS support
Windows does not have VirtIO drivers included. The Fedora project provides CD ISO images with compiled and signed VirtIO drivers for Windows.
See
- https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-windows-virtual-machines-using-virtio-drivers/index.html
- http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers
- http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers
The source code of those drivers can be found on Github. See https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows
Driver ISOs
Each of the ISOs is labelled with a numeric release.
- Older versions could still be useful when, as it happens, a Windows VM shows instability or incompatibility with the latest drivers.
- a web repository https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/archive-virtio/
In the iso there are several dirs, with subdir for each supported OS version (2k19, 2k16, 2k12, 2k12R2, 2k3, 2k8, 2k8R2, w7, w8, w8.1, w10):
- Balloon
- guest-agent
- NetKVM
- pvpanic
- qemupciserial
- qxl
- qxldod
- viorng
- vioscsi
- vioserial
- viostor