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Installing Virtio Drivers In Windows On KVM

3rd July 2018

Virtio drivers are paravirtualized device drivers for KVM virtual machines.

Paravirtualized drivers enhance the performance of machines, decreasing I/O latency and increasing throughput to near bare-metal levels.

It is recommended to use the paravirtualized drivers for fully virtualized machines.

Most Linux distributions include the virtio drivers as standard. This guide explains how to install them in Windows.

This guide was written for Zetastack users but applies to any Windows guest VM running on a KVM host.

This includes Nutanix, Red Hat Virtualization (RHEV), Proxmox VE, oVirt and OpenStack.

If your device manager looks like this, then this guide will help you.

Download ISO

We recommend the stable release, the same as what is shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This is the link to download:

Download and add the ISO to your virtualization platform.

In Zetastack this is done in Settings Import.

Machine Configuration

Edit the machine configuration and set these:

• Disk bus: Virtio SCSI pass-through controller
• NIC model: Virtio Ethernet
• Video model: QXL
• Video RAM: 32MB

Attach ISO

This bit depends on whether you are installing a new Windows VM or you already have an existing Windows VM.

If you are installing a new Windows VM, set the ISO to be the 2nd CD-ROM drive leaving the Windows install ISO as the 1st CD-ROM drive.

Begin Install

If you are not installing a new Windows VM, you can skip this section.

Storage Driver

At the disk detection stage, the Windows installer cannot detect any disks for installation.

This is expected behaviour, since the virtio drivers have not been loaded yet and are not included by Microsoft in the installation media.

Click «Load driver» and select «CD Drive (E:) virtio-win-0.1.1»

The driver required is the «VirtIO SCSI pass-through controller» located at:

For other editions of Windows, the driver will be located in the relevant directory on the ISO.

Select the driver and click «Next».

The driver is loaded and the and the disk is now detected.

Select the disk for installation and click «Next».

Post Install

Once the installation is complete and the VM has booted, the next steps are to install the guest agent and resolve any missing drivers.

Guest Agent

It is essential the guest agent is installed.

The guest agent is used by the hypervisor to communicate directly with the VM.

The guest agent is required for clean VM shutdown and to enable live snapshots of the VM images.

On the task bar click «File Explorer».

Select «This PC» then double click «CD Drive (E:) virtio-win-0.1.1».

Open the «guest-agent» folder.

Right click the «qemu-ga-x64» file and select «Install».

The QEMU guest agent will now install.

Once installed the VM must be completely shutdown before the agent can run.

When the VM is started again, the guest agent service will automatically start.

Device Manager

In Device Manager we can see the following unconfigured devices.

This table lists the devices and the drivers required.

Device	Driver
Storage controller	Virtio SCSI pass-through controller (already installed)
Ethernet controller	Virtio Ethernet adapter
PCI device	Virtio balloon driver
PCI input device	Virtio input driver
PCI simple communications controller	Virtio serial driver
Display adapter	QXL video driver
HID button over interrupt driver	Generic bus

The procedure is simple but repetitive.

Generic Bus

This is a Microsoft bug which is easily resolved.

Right click on «HID Button over Interrupt Driver» and select «Update Driver Software. «

Select «Browse my computer for driver software».

Select «Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer».

Select the model «Generic Bus».

This resolves the bug, and removes the driver warning.

Virtio Ethernet Adapter

This is a high speed driver capable of 10GbE and better.

Right click on «Ethernet Controller» and select «Update Driver Software. «.

Select «Browse my computer for driver software».

Select «CD Drive (E:) virtio-win-0.1.1» and click OK.

Device Manager will automatically find the correct driver. The path to the driver does not need to be specified.

At the prompt click «Install».

The driver is installed.

The device description has now changed in Device Manager.

Virtio Balloon Driver

The balloon driver allows the memory in the VM to be changed dynamically.

Right click on «PCI Device» and select «Update Driver Software. «.

Follow the same steps for the Ethernet adapter above to complete the driver installation.

Virtio Input Driver

This provides accurate mouse tracking within the console.

Right click on «PCI Input Device» and select «Update Driver Software. «.

Follow the same steps for the Ethernet adapter above to complete the driver installation.

Virtio Serial Driver

This is a virtual serial port for communication between the hypervisor and the VM.

Right click on «PCI Simple Communications Controller» and select «Update Driver Software. «.

Follow the same steps for the Ethernet adapter above to complete the driver installation.

QXL Video Driver

This is a video driver that improves performance and allows for higher resolutions.

It also provides a seamless cursor when using the console to manage the VM.

Right click on «Microsoft Basic Display Adapter» and select «Update Driver Software. «.

Follow the same steps for the Ethernet adapter above to complete the driver installation.

Cursor Tweak

When using the QXL driver, the mouse cursor needs to be tweaked.

This will provide a seamless cursor in web based VM consoles.

On the start menu click «Settings».

Click «Mouse & touchpad».

Click «Additional mouse options».

In the Pointers tab, enable «Enable pointer shadow» and click OK to update.

This allows the use of black and extra large cursors.

Arch Linux User Repository

Search Criteria

Package Details: virtio-win 0.1.190.1-1

Package Actions

Git Clone URL:	https://aur.archlinux.org/virtio-win.git (read-only, click to copy)
Package Base:	virtio-win
Description:	virtio drivers for Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10) guests and floppy images for Windows XP
Upstream URL:	https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-windows-virtual-machines-using-virtio-drivers/index.html
Keywords:	images iso qemu windows
Licenses:	BSD-3-Clause
Submitter:	jetm
Maintainer:	jetm
Last Packager:	jetm
Votes:	66
Popularity:	1.33
First Submitted:	2015-08-12 23:17
Last Updated:	2020-11-24 22:16

Dependencies (1)

Required by (0)

Sources (3)

Latest Comments

miss_barfin commented on 2020-10-12 10:51

@ph3nix you should probably use «spice-guest-tools-windows» package for older than windows 8 oses

ph3nix commented on 2020-10-02 17:55

Either the package is broken or the description is inaccurate. Inserting the iso into a Windows 7 machine and trying to install fails with:

OS must be Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 or higher.

It seems like fedora dropped Windows 7 support? Which would seem odd because they still distribute Windows XP floppies. Not sure what is going on or where to report this issue.

jetm commented on 2020-02-01 01:55

@yan12125 Updated the license. Thanks!

yan12125 commented on 2020-01-31 10:06

Are those binaries are licensed under GPL2? From virtio-win_license.txt in virtio-win.iso, those files look like to be licensed with 3-clause BSD.

jetm commented on 2018-11-27 21:13

@dreieck: Thank you for the new URL. I have updated the package with the new URL.

dreieck commented on 2018-11-27 19:10

Please update the url to url= .

The current setting says

jetm commented on 2017-01-18 01:36

Hi @eworm, @jevv and @TingPing: I uploaded a new revision that joins the version to the source filenames. It will avoid issues with makepkg and pacaur.

The installation is kept unversioned to take advantage of what @jevv explained.

Thank you all for the suggestion, feedback, and clarification. Much appreciated.

je-vv commented on 2017-01-18 00:34

TingPing commented on 2017-01-17 23:17

@jevv You can install it unversioned, the point of downloading it versioned is so makepkg can handle updates sanely.

je-vv commented on 2017-01-17 23:15

I don’t see a problem by not naming the iso with its version on the unpacked SW. You will notice version changes when updating any ways.

See, if you have the iso always mounted on the win guest, then it’s pretty convenient to have it always named the same way.

But beyond that, what purpose would it serve, if any ways one will get only one iso at a time, and if in need to know the version pacman -Qs will provide the answer?

If the maintainer decides to go that way, I’d suggest keeping a link from the versioned iso to a non versioned link that needs no change every time there’s a new version available.

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