AW: AW: Windows DomU: Network Issues

[Paul Leiber <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Von: Xen-users <xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Im Auftrag von
> David Hill
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 12. Mai 2021 23:45
> 
> On 2021-05-10 1:55 p.m., Paul Leiber wrote:
> >> Von: Xen-users<xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>  Im Auftrag
> von
> >> Paul Leiber
> >> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 6. Mai 2021 21:47
> >>
> >> Further observations from Windows 10 device manager on the domU:
> >> - There is one device without a driver (yellow triangle), the device is 
> >> called
> >> XSC000 XENVIF 0
> >> - The system devices XenServer PV Interface, XenServer PV Bus (twice),
> and
> >> XenServer PV Network Class seem to be installed correctly
> >> - The NIC installed is shown as Realtek RTL8139C+ Fast Ethernet NIC
> > Solution: It turned out that I had to manually install the drivers for the
> unknown devices, (in device manager, select to install driver from disk, then
> select one of the pv drivers). In this way, I got both Windows Server 2012 and
> Windows 10 working. I had to use trial and error to find the correct setup, 
> but
> most stuff seems to work fine. The network speed is more than sufficient. I
> didn't even need to disable checksum offloading.
> >
> >
> Glad to hear you got it sorted.
> 
> The Beginner's Guide could use an update in spots. If you noticed
> anything in particular I'd appreciate hearing about it. I did some
> editing on the page last year and planned to make a few more
> improvements but got caught up in other things.  At a quick glance, I
> can see some things could be fixed up, like what the windows.cfg file
> should look like once Windows has completed installation.

Sounds like a good idea! I gladly will try to sum up my experience to help you.

I just checked the howto again, it seems mostly pretty good to me. It helped me 
to set up the Xen system very well without a lot of knowledge, at least the PV 
guest part. Even the HVM section worked insofar as the Windows installation 
generally worked. The only real issues that I had was that (1) I needed to 
enable usbdevice = 'tablet' or the mouse pointer would be off in VNCViewer and 
that (2) the keyboard layout was not correct (it took me quite some time to 
figure out why I couldn't login via Windows Remotedesktop after finalizing the 
installation in VNCViewer: The password I entered in Remotedesktop was not 
correct because the keymap in VNCViewer was partly wrong, hence I entered a 
password during installation that didn't match the intended password). These 
two parts could be adapted. However, I don't know if instead adapting the howto 
to using SPICE would make these changes unnecessary (see your comment below)?

What really was outdated was the section on the PV drivers for windows (as well 
as other sites in the wiki, e. g. 
https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Windows_GplPv/Installing, which seems to 
be completely obsolete). Here, a link to the Xen Project site 
https://xenproject.org/windows-pv-drivers/ would be helpful instead of the 
outdated links in the howto. Also, a comment that installation of some of the 
drivers needs to be done manually (as loosely described by me above) in the 
Windows device manager would have saved me a lot of time. Additionally, a note 
on how to switch off driver signature checking in Windows would help as long as 
the drivers are not signed.

BTW, should my experience with the Windows PV drivers be mentioned to the 
driver developers somehow? I guess it should be possible to make an automatic 
install work again, and there seems to be active development on the drivers?
 
> I'm no xen-pert but a couple of things in your cfg file made me wonder a
> bit. Is it a combination of two files or is half of it meant to be
> commented out? For example you have repeats of "boot=" and
> "device_model_version = " and I'm pretty sure you don't need/want the
> "kernel=" line once installation is complete.

Yes, you are right, there are duplicate entries stemming from copy-pasting. I 
corrected that, the file now looks like this:

kernel = "/usr/lib/xen-4.0/boot/hvmloader"
type='hvm'
memory = 4096
vcpus=4
name = "windows"
vif = ['bridge=xenbr0']
disk = ['phy:/dev/vg0/windows,hda,w']
device_model_version = 'qemu-xen'
boot="c"
hdtype = 'ahci'
acpi = 1
apic = 1
xen_platform_pci = 1
vendor_device = 'xenserver'
stdvga = 1
sdl = 0
serial = 'pty'
usb = 1
usbdevice = 'tablet'
keymap = 'de'
vnc = 1
vnclisten = "0.0.0.0"
vncpasswd = ""

To be honest, I played around with the config file (trial and error, with some 
documentation reading) until it seemed to work. I don't know the exact meaning 
of some of these entries (e.g. sdl, kernel). For example, there was another 
reply to my initial message regarding the pae option which I took out of the 
config file without any noticable effect. The official documentation (e.g. 
https://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable/man/xl.cfg.5.html#Direct-Kernel-Boot) is 
not easy to understand for me in some parts. I would appreciate it if you could 
explain (or point out the part in the documentation) if you would advise to 
make further changes in the cfg? 

> I also suggest you have a look at SPICE (see
> https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/SPICE_support_in_Xen and
> www.spice-space.org) and consider using it in place of vnc. At least on
> my system, it does a better job of mouse handling, USB passthrough and
> video performance generally.

Thank you for this hint, I will try this out next time!