Windows VirtIO Drivers

Introduction

VirtIO Drivers are paravirtualized drivers for kvm/Linux (see http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Virtio). A quite extended explanation about VirtIO drivers can be found here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-virtio.

In short, they enable direct (paravirtualized) access to device and peripherals to virtual machines using them, instead of slower, emulated, ones.

At the moment this kind of devices are supported:

• block (disks drives), see Paravirtualized Block Drivers for Windows
• network (ethernet cards), see Paravirtualized Network Drivers for Windows
• baloon (dynamic memory management), see Dynamic Memory Management

Windows OS support

While recent Linux kernels already have those drivers so any distribution, running in a kvm VM, should recognize virtio devices exposed by the kvm hypervisor, all current 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)

Packaged sets of drivers

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

Most recent set is virtio-win-0.1-74, with updates to virtio drivers as of 16 Oct 2013.

Previous versions could still be useful when, as it happens, some Windows VM shows instability or incompatibility with latest drivers set.

See also Windows_VirtIO_Drivers/Changelog