Microsoft Hyper-V drivers for Linux

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce, that after many months of discussions, Microsoft has released their Hyper-V Linux drivers under the GPLv2. Following this message, will be the patches that add the drivers to the drivers/staging/ tree, and a whole bunch of cleanups.

It's taken a long road to get here, and I'd like to thank the following people who made this possible:
- Steve Hemminger for the initial prodding and extreme patience
- Hank Janssen for providing the code and working with me to get it into a workable and semi-mergable state. His involvement within Microsoft was also invaluable.
- Sam Ramji for his push within Microsoft to make this happen in a manner that works with the Linux community.
- Novell for sponsoring my work on the Linux Driver project, without which, this would not have even been possible.
And there are many others both within Novell and Microsoft, who I do not want to slight by not naming, but the list would be too long to go into.

These drivers are to enable Linux to work better when running as a guest on top of the Hyper-V system. There is still a lot of work to do in getting this into "proper" mergable state, and moving it out of the staging directory, but Hank and I will be undertaking this task. See the TODO file in the drivers/staging/hv/ directory if anyone wishes to help out with this task.

The code should be showing up in the linux-next tree soon, as the patches are now in my public tree.

If anyone has any questions about this code, please let me and Hank know about it.

thanks,

greg k-h