specVirtioDeviceDrivers

Summary

In order for some 3rd party OS to run properly on top of KVM we need to provide virtio device drivers for disk and network access

Release Note

Ubuntu now provides virtio device driver for Windows versions XXX (network and disk) allowing to obtain near bare metal performances when running Windows on Ubuntu's preferred hypervisor, KVM. For details on how to obtain and deploy these drivers, please refer to xxxxx

Rationale

Cloud and virtualization users often have to deploy some versions of Windows in their environment. Without virtio device drivers, these guest are horribly slow (10% of bare metal speed), while with virtio drivers, we would expect this to be near bare metal speed.

User stories

  • Cloud Provider X wants to offer windows guest support to his customers on Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure
  • Company Y wants to virtualize their existing server workloads, but they still have some legacy servers running windows.

Assumptions

  • Signed and Windows certified drivers cannot be provided due to Microsoft's certification contract
  • Should be provided within packages to be deployed on hosts
  • Package should make it easy to mount the driver's directory as a read only disk in KVM

Design

You can have subsections that better describe specific parts of the issue.

Implementation

This section should describe a plan of action (the "how") to implement the changes discussed. Could include subsections like:

UI Changes

Should cover changes required to the UI, or specific UI that is required to implement this

Code Changes

Code changes should include an overview of what needs to change, and in some cases even the specific details.

Migration

Include:

  • data migration, if any
  • redirects from old URLs to new ones, if any
  • how users will be pointed to the new way of doing things, if necessary.

Test/Demo Plan

It's important that we are able to test new features, and demonstrate them to users. Use this section to describe a short plan that anybody can follow that demonstrates the feature is working. This can then be used during testing, and to show off after release. Please add an entry to http://testcases.qa.ubuntu.com/Coverage/NewFeatures for tracking test coverage.

This need not be added or completed until the specification is nearing beta.

Unresolved issues

This should highlight any issues that should be addressed in further specifications, and not problems with the specification itself; since any specification with problems cannot be approved.

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.


CategorySpec

ServerTeam/specVirtioDeviceDrivers (last edited 2011-10-27 10:06:22 by mx)