GPLPV Drivers

[Dustin Marquess <dmarquess%gmail.com@localhost>]

With some minor kludging, I've managed to get the latest GPLPV drivers to work under a NetBSD dom0.

The issue appears to be in the way the backend PCI device states are.  GPLPV is expecting the backend state to initially be XenbusStateInitWait, however under NetBSD it seems to already be in a XenbusStateConnected state.  I'm not sure if this is a NetBSD bug or a GPLPV one, but the GPLPV author seems to think it might be a GPLPV one.

Anyways, I modified the code to handle either state, and for the most part it just works.  There a couple of minor glitches, but nothing major.  I've been running them in production for the last couple of days.  If you want to try them out, I published the .msi's to:

http://www.networkopscenter.com/pv/

Keep in mind that these are selfsigned drivers, so Vista x64 & Win7 x64 users will need to enable testsigning!

Known Issues:

- The filter code seems to be correctly filtering the qemu PIIX controller, but not the qemu emulated NICs.  I'm not sure if this is by design or not.  I'm going to look into it, but right now it's easy enough to just go into Device Manager and disable the emulated NICs.

- Related to above: You might get an annoying "One or more services failed to state" message.  This is probably because it's still trying to load the drivers for the emulated NICs, yet they're disabled.  It's harmless, but if you want it to go away you can use Autoruns or something similar to disable the loading of the driver.

- Changing properties on the PV NICs (eg, to change checksum offloading and such) seems to cause an unstable state.  Under 2k3 the PV NIC disappears, under 2k8 R2, the VM BSODs.  However after reboot, the NIC works and has the new settings, so it's just an annoyance.  I'm looking into this issue too.

I'd be interested in some feedback!

-Dustin