[Xen-users] Release 0.9.0 of GPL PV Drivers for Windows

["James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've just put up the latest release of the GPLPV drivers for Windows.
This release involved a fairly big rewrite of the stuff that talks to
Windows as I changed from WDF to WDM. WDF is a newer framework from
Microsoft which makes it easier to write drivers as a lot of the state
management stuff is done for you. It also means shipping a great big dll
around with the drivers (note the difference in size between this and
the previous version), and makes it really hard to do some things. With
any luck eventually these drivers will be buildable under Linux using
something like MinGW, which wouldn't have been possible under WDF.

*** WARNING *** Just to spell it out clearly, do not use these drivers
on a production DomU. And if you use them on a production Dom0, make
sure you have good backups. There was a bug that made my Dom0 freeze for
5-10 minutes (no lasting damage when it unfroze though). That bug is
fixed now but it's always possible that there could be others ***
WARNING ***

Almost everything that was working before should be working now, but
obviously this version hasn't seen nearly as much testing. The one thing
that definitely is not working is disabling the drivers - you'll get a
crash if you try that or if you try to upgrade from this version to the
next one. I'll get on to that eventually.

To upgrade from a version less that 0.9.0, you'll really need to clean
your system of any old drivers. The supplied uninstall_0.8.x.bat might
do the trick - you'll need to copy it into the directory you installed
the 0.8.x drivers from though before you run it. Failing that, email me
and I'll help if I can.

On a clean system, install.bat should do the install, much the same as
before. There is no 'stub' driver at the moment, so you'll be prompted
for drivers for the 'vfb' and 'console' devices. Just ignore that for
now. Without /GPLPV specified in the boot.ini the xenvbd and xennet
drivers will just sit in 'Failed to start. Code 10' state. See the next
paragraph for why.

Also changed in this release is a different approach to xenhide which
hides the QEMU ATA and network PCI devices (and the xen devices when
GPLPV is specified). Hopefully this should put an end to the problem of
duplicate disks and the resulting corruption. At the moment it will
leave 'hidden' devices visible with a yellow exclamation mark, because
of the way it fails them. I'll fix that too (by hiding them - the yellow
exclamation mark will still be there if you tell windows to show hidden
devices)

You can download from http://www.meadowcourt.org/downloads/ , and I've
also created a few wiki pages - still pretty bare at the moment but you
can see where I'm going at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenWindows
.

Enjoy!

James


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