Re: GPLPV Drivers

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010, Dustin Marquess wrote:
> With some minor kludging, I've managed to get the latest GPLPV drivers to
> work under a NetBSD dom0.

Excellent work!

> 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!

Initial testing with Xen 3.3.2 is positive.

The block and network PV drivers work well. Even better, "xm shutdown 
domain" now does a clean shutdown of the domU rather than rudely pulling 
the virtual power plug on it.

> 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.

I have the "Xen Block Device Driver" in SCSI and RAID controllers, but I 
also have "Intel(R) 82371SB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller in IDE ATA/ATAPI 
controllers" which is listed as not being able to start. Should this 
device be hidden entirely?

> - 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.

I've disabled the emulated NIC and the IDE Controller. For me, this stops 
the services failing to start message.

--
Stephen