Official Windows 8/8.1/10 Support?

[stevenwi...@gmail.com]

Is there any info available when Qubes will officially support Windows 8/8.1/10?

Or is that not work in progress right now?

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

In practice there is no progress on this. Since the code is open source
now, everyone can help us here. There are two main areas:

1. Make the tools (without gui-agent) compile for Windows 8/8.1/10 -
this is probably very simple, or not needed at all. Maybe just disabling
gui-agent during tools installation is enough (without need to recompile
at all). Then qrexec should work, which means support for: clipboard
operations, file copy, network setup etc.

2. Make gui-agent working in non-seamless mode. This will probably
require some code changes. Rafał - could you briefly describe what is
needed here? AFAIR current gui-agent (especially video driver) rely on
API no longer present in Windows 8+.

We've invested a lot of time in researching proper seamless-mode support
using new Windows video driver architecture (WDDM). Proper support means
extracting composition buffers of each window separately, instead of
cutting them from "full desktop image". We hoped to manage this by
implementing virtual GPU driver, but ultimately failed mostly because of
quality of documentation for part of driver API. The best we've got is a
driver which didn't failed at load time, but at the same time didn't get
any screen assigned...

So, I think proper seamless mode for Windows 8+ is a lost cause for now.
But non-seamless mode support should be quite easy.

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJYbty+AAoJENuP0xzK19csQkEH/j0BG7sSiP4KooCDkk4hovUG
WvNAknCkRFxK/48XIn7jMV5m5od17TuNqgfLMfrLMa11GA29YJ/gEthhrmaN3eZM
BHwXzPLWNaqONyUoX0rOYcpoOdvnyonfIUz3usIE+DVykTKGFMwaDH4Mut9zsFtu
C9IjXWYDLl8FSSJSPKi0xv+0GB6U/ByeSxCZy6JTDy66i4y16FJIPlT4LEq2coAd
DeQxs5aSAdrVZt1VLeSetkRfKrAAV/Nv7lOogGp8TdrwybiuOwT4G7gOxwvEYq4p
qw2xJYz8i9Z4HgaSVO3LMajb/kbKgF4E6/s0opR4QTfSW6auJk7+qGU4UWSv4LA=
=DPWt
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Eric Shelton]

OpenXT has solved a lot of windows guest issues (including sound, as I noted previously), and I believe supports Windows 10 fairly well.  It might be worth seeing how they have worked out some of this:

https://github.com/OpenXT/xc-windows

In particular, their graphics-related code:

https://github.com/OpenXT/xc-windows/tree/master/xengfx

However, I think this is non-seamless.  It's not clear that there is _any_ open source solution for Windows 10 seamless mode to refer to (for example, a search for '"windows 10" seamless virtualbox' seems to only turn up bug reports).

I wonder if there might be some convergence/standardization on PV interfaces for input, audio, and graphics that might let work like this become more of a drop-in solution across platforms, including Qubes.  The OpenXT developers seem to be making a concerted and consistent effort at upstreaming their work.  This type of idea will be the subject of another post...

Eric