[et-mgmt-tools] virtio support in libvirt and virt-manager?

[Cole Robinson]

Emre Erenoglu wrote:
> Hi Again Daniel,
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Daniel P. Berrange
> <berrange at redhat.com <mailto:berrange at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     Our design paradigm / goal is not to provide this kind of level of
>     detail in the UI. The choice of IDE vs SCSI vs VirtIO vs Xen PV is
>     determined automatically when you choose the OS Type & OS Variant.
>     eg, if you choose Fedora >= 9, then we know that we should use VirtIO.
>
>
> Thanks for the response. I understand the design decision. As you
> know, there are many distributions around, and not all are listed in
> the OS Type&Variant, such as my virtio supported distro Pardus. May I ask:
>
> 1) Will we have a choice such as "generic virtio enabled distribution"
> in the Linux os variants?

Something along these lines probably isn't a bad idea. If virtio
capabilities
are available in all kernels past 2.6.foo, then we will definitely want
something like this, maybe just worded in a different way.

> 2) If we are installing Windows and then we'll install KVM paravirtual
> virtio drivers, how shall we do?
> 3) What if a generic distro is installed without virtio first, but
> then can become virtio-enabled by an initrd configuration file?
>

Current upstream virt-manager will allow you to add a virtio disk to an
existing guest: you just choose the virtio option from the device type drop
down that also includes scsi, ide disk, floppy, etc.

There is no option to choose a network device model when adding a
nic to an existing guest, though this isn't something I'd be opposed to
adding.

But as far as install time is concerned, the distro dictionary is really the
way to solve this.

Thanks,
Cole