xp guest drivers
I've been planning to wean myself off of my Windows desktop for a while as I so despise Microsoft and Windows however I do have some Windows apps I still need to run, Quicken for example. Running Windows as a virtual guest on my Gentoo Gnome desktop is the perfect solution and after a lot of reading on kvm I'm finally working on converting my desktop computer to this setup. Just installed a basic XP guest that I'm going to use as my master and clone a copy for the rest of my install. I used a lot of Hayden's tips to configure the guest and I am very pleased with the performance, in many ways it's faster than my native install was.
Anyway, my question is besides the paravirtual network drivers, what other drivers should I install in my guest? Should I install any drivers matching my native hardware? Or just use the drivers Windows installs?
The only issue I've run into so far is that my network occasionally drops out, host and guest, for 5 minutes or so then comes back. I booted my computer up the other day, command prompt only no Xwindows, and logged in from work to finish up some configuration and the network never dropped out so it seems to be related either to Xwindows and/or running the guest. I'm using bridged networking. Any ideas about what might be causing the connectivity problem?
Jah,
As far as xp drivers, there's no need to install any other drivers apart from paravirtual drivers for performance. Apart from the paravirtual devices, your windows guest will only see emulated devices and your windows guest already has those drivers installed.
Only in the case of pci passthrough with vt-d will you need to worry about using drivers in your guest to see your host devices. KVM is still in the development stage of pci passthrough so I wouldn't worry about that too much right now.
As far as your network connectivity how did you configure your bridged networking? By hand or with virt-manager? And what mac address did you use for your bridged network?
Haydn,
I set up bridged networking by hand. I'm running Gentoo, btw. From my notes, here's what I did:
# Create bridge
# brctl addbr br0
#Turn off filtering (sysctl.conf)
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-filter-vlan-tagged = 0
#Turn off 30 sec delay
# brctl setfd br0 0
# activate bridge and tap interfaces
# brctl addif br0 eth0
# brctl addif br0 tap0
in /etc/conf.d/net:
# br0
#
bridge_br0="eth0"
config_br0=(
"10.0.0.12 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.0.0.255"
)
RC_NEED_br0="net.eth0"
brctl_br0=( "setfd 0" "sethello 0" "stp off" )
routes_br0=( "default gw 10.0.0.1" )
So br0 inhertits the mac address of eth0, they are both the same. In the Windows guest I deleted the nic in device manager and then reinstalled the paravirtual drivers. I've been working in the guest for a while now and haven't noticed the network dropping. Maybe that fixed the problem but the network was dropping out in the host too so not sure...
Haydn,
Well, after working on the guest all day it seems that networking is either active on the guest or the host but not both at the same time. So should my bridge device have a different mac address than eth0 then? tap0 does have a different mac but br0 inherits the same mac as eth0. Today (and a little yesterday) is the first day I have really worked much with kvm. I did a few tests on another system remotely, mainly just booting Linux livecd's so if I have misconfigured something today is really the first day I would have noticed it...
It's not a problem for your bridge to have same mac as your host. In fact this is the recommended configuration.
I forgot all about my Cisco switch, it was port security causing my drop outs. I should have realized because of the weird way it was dropping in and out but I so seldom need to do anything with the switch that I tend to forget it exists.
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