In order to allow creating a guest with virtio devices, we need support in virtinst such that the guest xml goes from e.g. <disk type='file' device='disk'> <source file='...'/> <target dev='hda'/> </disk> <interface type='bridge'> <source bridge='...'/> <mac address='...'/> </interface> to: <disk type='file' device='disk'> <source file='...'/> <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> </disk> <interface type='bridge'> <source bridge='...'/> <mac address='...'/> <model type='virtio'/> </interface>
The choice of device type shouldn't be exposed to the user - we should auto-select the most appropriate choice based on the OS type / variant details. eg, Fedora 10, or Ubuntu Hardy Heron shoudl automatically get given a virtio network, FreeBSD can be given ne2k NIC (iirc it has problems with rtl8139) and everything else can default to rtl8139.
See ubuntu's patches at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/virtinst/+bug/218574 General idea is that OS_TYPES is modified so that for e.g. F9 and later we'd know to use virtio
Okay I have this working at the moment, and hopefully a more general infrastructure for adding device defaults in the future. Couple questions: 1) F9 supports virtio? Both disk and net? 2) At least on my F9 box, using virtio networking and pxe throws an error: "No valid PXE rom found for network device" Known limitation? Just trying to determine if I should put a special case in virtinst for this. Thanks
(In reply to comment #3) > Okay I have this working at the moment, and hopefully a more general > infrastructure for adding device defaults in the future. > > Couple questions: > 1) F9 supports virtio? Both disk and net? Yep. > 2) At least on my F9 box, using virtio networking and pxe throws an error: > "No valid PXE rom found for network device" > Known limitation? Just trying to determine if I should put a special > case in virtinst for this. Yeah, I think PXE support is a recent addition on the *host* side. Haven't tried it myself. Just passing qemu-kvm a kernel/initrd on the command line works fine with virtio.
Okay, I've added this in upstream: f9 and f10 use virtio for disk and net devices ubuntu hardy uses it for just net (there's a note about lack disk virtio issues in their changelog) virtio is skipped for the first network device if using pxe. This is at least neccessary for f9, i'll test to see if virtio + pxe bombs on rawhide. Couple related fixes as well: virt-install doesn't require both an os type and variant specified now, just a variant is sufficient. So to test this, only --os-variant fedora9 is needed. freebsd6/7 now defaults to using ne2k, as dan mentioned openbsd defaults to pcnet, which was mentioned on et-mgmt-tools a while back and some openbsd wiki pages I found. Setting this to POST (or should I just close this since Virtualization is for upstream bugs?)
I'm closing this since it is fixed upstream.