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/

  here you can find both stable and latest sets of drivers

  • in source format (.zip)
  • in compiled format (.iso)
  • The binary drivers are digitally signed by Red Hat (but NOT WHQL), and will work on 64-bit versions of Windows

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

See also

• Paravirtualized Block Drivers for Windows
• Paravirtualized Network Drivers for Windows
• Dynamic Memory Management