Re: [win-pv-devel] New windows pv drivers question

[Paul Durrant <Paul.Durrant@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Moving xen-devel to bcc and adding win-pv-devel...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Fabio Fantoni [mailto:fabio.fantoni@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 19 September 2014 09:55
> To: xen-devel; Paul Durrant
> Subject: New windows pv drivers question
> 
> Hi, I saw the "new" pvdriver drivers in xen's git repository and the new
> wiki pages about.
> I want start to try them if possible (for example to seems if occasion
> windows domUs network crash  I had with xen 4.4-stable and xen-unstable
> is ejbpv driver or xen problem), I saw that there are 3 repository in
> xenserver's github still missed here but seems with a fast look that all
> essential drivers repositories are in xen's git now.

Fabio,

That's right. I have a blog to introduce the new Xen Project Windows PV Drivers 
sub-project ready to go but it's run into some technical difficulties; 
hopefully I'll get it out early next week.
Not all the code that is relevant to XenServer is necessarily relevant to the 
wider Xen community; e.g. the guest agent and installer are very much 
XenServer-specific and therefore they do not form part of the sub-project. All 
the driver code is available on xenbits (under the pvdrivers/win directory) 
though and it has been stripped of XenServer branding. (The branding is now 
parameterized and applied at build time, so anyone can build their own branded 
binaries should they wish to).
 
> Is possible start basic tests of them or there are still other important
> changes and/or fixes to do?
> If is possible start test them there is a testing build available or or
> should I do it?
> 

I am setting up some build infrastructure as part of the sub-project - in fact 
I just got it going for the first time yesterday - and I hope to have 
un-branded binary packages available for the community in the very near future.
In the meantime, there are build instructions available on the wiki at 
http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Windows_PV_Drivers/Building which are fairly 
straightforward, so you should be able to build your own. Happily Microsoft 
made building drivers free again the with Windows 8.1 WDK as you can now use 
the Visual Studio 2013 Express (i.e. free) edition compiler. Note that you 
don't have to use the Visual Studio IDE; there are python scripts in the driver 
repositories which wrap the msbuild utility so you can drive it all from the 
command line :-)

AFAIK the drivers should work in pretty much any host environment: I have been 
testing them myself on a recent build of xen-unstable using my own 3.14-ish 
dom0 kernel and upstream QEMU. Just make sure you enable test-signing in your 
VMs.

> Thanks for any reply and sorry for my bad english.

No problem. Please get back to me (cc-ing win-pv-devel) if you do run into 
difficulties.

Cheers,

    Paul

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