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RE: [Xen-users] Release 0.8.0 of GPL PV Drivers for Windows

To: "Emre ERENOGLU" <erenoglu@xxxxxxxxx>, "jim burns" <jim_burn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [Xen-users] Release 0.8.0 of GPL PV Drivers for Windows
From: "James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:07:17 +1100
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Thread-topic: [Xen-users] Release 0.8.0 of GPL PV Drivers for Windows
> 
> I think this shall be using paravirtual drivers, so no vt-d stuff or
> pciback kind of trick. James, could you confirm?

Correct. Read Jun's posts.

> Some additional questions:

I assume these questions are all about pvSCSI.

> - Can we say this is "faster" than the other SCSI paravirtual driver?

In theory, if you have a backend device which is SCSI (eg a physical
disk), and you want to map the whole disk through to a domU, then yes
this could be faster as it is just a pipe to pass scsi commands through
(mostly) unmodified. I haven't done any benchmarks, and the current cut
of the xenscsi driver represents only a few days of 'spare time' work on
my behalf (it's a heavily modified version of xenvbd), so there may be a
few optimisations that could be made.

> - Does the driver still work if I didn't apply those patches for
pvSCSI

The xenscsi driver will only work if you have applied Jun's patches.
Xenvbd continues to work as it always did.

> - Does anybody know if there's any plan to merge those patches into
xen-
> unstable? If not, why?

I followed the discussion when the original set of patches were posted a
while back. Keir and others made a few suggestions as to things that
would need to be done before a merge would be considered. I believe all
the concerns have been addressed with this set of patches.

Since testing, I've made a few more suggestions which I believe will be
required before they could be considered working.

James

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