Windows VirtIO Drivers

Introduction

VirtIO Drivers are paravirtualized drivers for kvm/Linux (see http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Virtio).

A quite extended explanation can be found here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-virtio.

Recent Linux kernels already have those drivers so any distribution, running in a kvm VM, should recognize virtio devices exposed by the kvm hypervisor.

On the other side, All Windows OS need special drivers to use virtio devices. Microsoft does not provide them, so someone kindly managed to make virtio drivers available also for windows systems.

See

• http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers
• http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers

Following info on those page you can find:

• a git repository: https://github.com/YanVugenfirer/kvm-guest-drivers-windows

  this is the source for the Windows drivers and is hosted in a repository on GIT hub. Anonymous users can clone the repository

• a web repository http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/

  here you can find "packaged" sets of drivers

  • in source format (.zip)
  • in compiled format (.iso)

  Each of "packaged" sets of drivers is labelled with a numeric release, and differs by features & bugs as it improves through the time.