RHBA-2018:3413 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated virtio-win packages that fix several bugs and add two enhancements are now available for the Supplementary channel of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Description

The virtio-win package provides paravirtualized network drivers for most Microsoft Windows operating systems. Paravirtualized drivers are virtualization-aware drivers used by fully virtualized guests running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fully virtualized guests using the paravirtualized drivers gain significantly better I/O performance than fully virtualized guests running without the drivers.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, Windows guest machines in some cases became unresponsive when creating a live snapshot, and logged a "cannot acquire state change lock" error message. This update fixes the way the QEMU guest agent handles the fsfreeze utility, which prevents the problem from occurring. For details, see the following Knowledgebase solution: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3426861. (BZ#1596457)
• The virtio-scsi driver previously consumed excessive system resources when used in multi-queue mode. This update optimizes queue-locking in multi-queue configurations, which significantly improves the performance of virtio-scsi in multi-queue mode. (BZ#1253610)
• Prior to this update, Windows Server 2008 guests in some cases took very long to acquire a system IP after rebooting. The virtio driver has been fixed to properly follow its configuration for querying link states. As a result, acquiring IP now takes significantly less time on Windows Server 2008 guests. (BZ#1532472)
• When two or more virtio-blk devices were connected to a Windows 10 or a Windows Server 2016 guest at the same time, the guest system reported "event ID:158" errors. With this update, each virtio-blk device reports a unique ID to the affected guest systems, which ensures that the described errors no longer occur. (BZ#1549455)
• Previously, certain virtual floppy drive (VFD) files used for building virtio-win drivers became unreadable due to excessive size. As a consequence, installing virtio-win using virtual floppy disks in some cases failed. This update creates separate image files for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, which makes it possible for VFD installations of virtio-win to work properly. (BZ#1620307)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancements:

• The Windows software trace preprocessor (WPP) feature is now supported by the virtio-win drivers. As a result, on virtual machines using Windows 7 and later, it is now possible to use WPP software tracing to log real-time binary messages. For more information about WPP, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/wpp-software-tracing (BZ#1556868)
• This update implements a number of improvements for virtio-win handling of small network packets. This significantly improves the network performance of Windows guests that use small-packet traffic. (BZ#1561921)

Users of virtio-win are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 7 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 929084 - Win8.64 guest can not hotplug/hotunplug scsi-hd/scsi-disk/scsi-cd successfully without "Rescan Disks"
• BZ - 1139291 - [NetKVM] Handle correctly surprise removal
• BZ - 1253610 - [virtio-win][vioscsi] Throughput with queue=4 is worse than queue=1
• BZ - 1351089 - The mac address didn't change when set ctrl_mac_addr=off
• BZ - 1495070 - [virtio-win][viostor]windows 2016 stuck/bsod when run iometer on AMD host
• BZ - 1530210 - [VIOSTOR] virtio-block driver for Windows doesn't support iommu_platform=on device command line option
• BZ - 1532472 - [virtio-win][netkvm] it takes a long time to get ip after "set_link on" with "status=off" on windows 2008-32/64
• BZ - 1536331 - Failed to upgrade qemu-ga without virtio-serial driver installed
• BZ - 1539256 - Unable to install virtio-scsi driver if option iommu_platform=on is specified
• BZ - 1549455 - Event ID: 158 is logged on Win10/WS2016 when two or more virtio-blk disks attached to VM
• BZ - 1549587 - [NetKVM] Add support in virtio-net Windows driver for VIRTIO_F_IOMMU_PLATFORM virtio feature
• BZ - 1551918 - Lack of viorng* files in virtio-win-prewhql-0.1-148
• BZ - 1556856 - virtio-input: Windows vioinput guest driver tablet input bug reported upstream (QEMU)
• BZ - 1556868 - Make sure all drivers have WPP integrated and enabled
• BZ - 1561921 - [NetKVM] Investigate possible performance improvements for high speed network hosts, small packets and multi-queue
• BZ - 1562118 - Rebase qemu-ga-win for RHEL-7.6 (Windows guests)
• BZ - 1566298 - [virtio-win][viostor] unattended installation failure on unpartitioned image when using virtio_blk
• BZ - 1568739 - [virtio-win][vioscsi] Win7/win2008 guest BSOD after the first reboot when installing os with virtio_scsi
• BZ - 1569329 - [virtio-win]virtio-win-prewhql-150 copyright show 2017 in all inf, sys, license files
• BZ - 1577054 - [virtio-win][netkvm] Whql job "NDISTest 6.0 - [1 Machine] - 1c_Mini6PerfSend" fails on win10-32/64 and w2k12-64/r2
• BZ - 1577708 - [virtio-win][netkvm][whql] Job "E2EPerf" fail with build151
• BZ - 1580096 - NetKVM: Interrupt vectors to CPU mapping fix
• BZ - 1594113 - Error returned after issue {"execute":"guest-fstrim"} cmd for win7-32/64 and win2008-32/64/r2 guest
• BZ - 1599631 - [virtio-win][netkvm][whql] Job "NDISTest 6.0 - [2 Machine] - 2c_Mini6RSSSendRecv (Multi-Group Win8+)" BSOD with build154/156
• BZ - 1607275 - [virtio-win][viostor] win2008 viostor driver loading failed during guest installation when -smp>2
• BZ - 1609228 - [virtio-win][vioscsi] guest can not generate dump file
• BZ - 1620307 - virtio-win vfd files are full, need a new split (server/desktop drivers)

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)