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Apparently
a James Harper in Australia has been working on PV drivers for Windows on GPL
Xen for some time. I don’t know if this link will work for others,
but it looks like it should (though probably not permanently): I
downloaded his latest work, WindowsXenPV-0.8.9.zip, but apparently compilation
is required. I know Windows drivers and programs don’t have to be different
(on account of Windows) the way they do on Linux (because of the many different
distros), so I am not sure why compilation is required unless it is somehow
related to the version of Xen running on the host system potentially offering
up paravirtualization in a different way. I am not sure on this because
the directions are slightly vague and if I read them properly, source code for
the version of Xen in question is not mentioned. Anyway, I am curious as
to whether or not anyone can point me toward a these drivers in an already
compiled state. I don’t know if they would be included in any
certain repository of which I am unaware or whether it is more likely that they
simply don’t exist (yet). As I am running F7, I am also curious as
to whether or not Fedora’s custom Xen kernels would even support the PV
capabilities on HVMs. I say on HVMs because it is my understanding that
the Windows machine decides which drivers to load (and which devices to detect)
based on a boot switch in the VM OS and I haven’t seen anything indicating
a separate Xen setup for full PV. I
ask because I would love to download binary drivers and have a go at this, but
actually building it all is a bit more complicated and time consuming for me
(especially if I’m re-inventing the wheel), as I’ve never compiled
anything in Windows and don’t have any of the necessary software readily
available (free to download, but I don’t have any seriously high speed
access). I also don’t know whether it is possible that the Fedora
team (or any third party) would have any interest in compiling these drivers or
making them available even if someone else did the work since they are for
Windows and would certainly require manual installation after download/(yum) “install”.
It would be possible (though far from automated) to mount the VM partition and
copy the directory tree to it, so downloading them directly to the Dom0 doesn’t
seem like a problem to me, but downloading them on the DomU would work as well
if they were available some other way. I would love to find out that the
version of Xen doesn’t matter for PV drivers (beyond being above 3.0 or whatever),
that the Fedora version is standard in regards to PV, that a compiled version
is available because of that, and that one can download it from URL X as such, but
I am rarely so lucky. As
an interesting aside, apparently the KVM project includes a PV driver for Windows
networking, but this (not necessarily production ready) Xen GPLPV driver
package includes not only networking, but also block devices and a service to
enable the xm shutdown and xm restart commands. Anyway, I welcome all input.
Thanks, Dustin |
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