Re: Automatic installation of drivers/agent in Windows XP

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr redhat com>]

On Wed, 2012-03-28 at 17:39 +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> Lately I've been looking at installing automatically the virtio and qxl
> drivers as well as the spice vdagent as part of unattended windows
> installations. This would make the out of the box experience much better
> 
> So far I've had success with winxp (haven't looked at win7 yet), here is a

One of the main differences with win 2008 onwards (including 7) is that
the unattended file is an xml file. The autotest unattended install code
has ideas to guide on that.

> summary of how I've done it so that we can start discussing how to
> integrate this best in gnome-boxes/libosinfo.
> 
> What I've come up with is
> - use of the viostor driver during Windows installation (this is done
>   through a txtsetup.oem file)

No need for a txtsetup.oem or putting drivers on a floppy for win2008
onwards, making things dramatically easier.

> - execution of an arbitrary .exe when the installed WinXP first starts
>   (this is done through the addition of a [GuiRunOnce] category in the
>    winnt.sif file)
> 
> The latter can be used to run an installer for the various drivers/agents
> we will need in the OS.
> 
> The way I see things working for gnome-boxes is that:
> - it copies the viostor driver and a txtsetup.oem file to the unattended
>   floppy
> - (optional) adding DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore may be needed if we use
>   drivers whose signature Windows doesn't like
> - either it copies a post-install driver installer to the floppy, or it uses an iso
>   image with the post-install driver installer

^ Provided that you have a post install driver installer, this works.
Problem is that for virtio, there's none as far as I know. Also, viostor
*must* be on floppy, regardless of having it as an installer, otherwise
it's impossible to bootstrap the install.

> - it adds what is needod to the winnt.sif file to run this installer
> 
> The reason I'm considering using  an iso image to store the installer is
> that 1.44MB is very small, especially since recent virtio-win drivers ship
> a dll which is already about this size.

For Windows XP you're out of luck for viostor, see above. For netkvm
(the network driver), it's ok, but we don't have a proper installer for
it.
> 
> The next step is figuring out what does what. I think it will be up to
> boxes to get the viostor drivers and the driver installer iso. Since just
> copying the viostor drivers to the floppy disk (assuming txtsetup.oem is
> shipped with them), I don't think libosinfo needs to be involved there.
> For running the installer after the install is done, adding a
> _set_post_inst_command or _set_first_run_command would probably make sense
> in libosinfo. It would be up to gnome-boxes to know the command is
> "E:\myinstaller.exe".
> 
> Finally, one last thing to solve once all of this is in place is how to
> distribute these drivers/installers so that gnome-boxes can easily get
> them.
> 
> Any thoughts?

Probably have the drivers to ship in a distro package file (rpm, deb,
etc..) with an .iso file and a .vfd (floppy) file, just as RHEL has been
doing lately.