kvm-driver-disc-20080318

This is the first release of the kvm drivers disc -- a collection of kvm guest drivers packaged as an ISO 9660 CD-ROM for easy installation.

The driver disc can be obtained from the kvm download page, below.

Initial release:
- kvm-guest-drivers-linux-1
- kvm-guest-drivers-windows-1

http://kvm.qumranet.com

Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.


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Are you interested in collecting ports of the drivers for various distributions?

I have the virtio drivers working with RHEL4. The virtio_net appears to be working better than e1000 for the workload I am testing with (though I still the need the noapic boot option). The virtio_blk driver mostly works (the VM freezes from time and time which gdb and strace seem to clear); its performance so far lags the scsi driver.

david

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What we would like to do, is have the kvm-guest-drivers-linux.git tree autogenerate backports for as far back as we need them. Posting what you needed to do for RHEL4 would be helpful. What would be most helpful is actually submitting a patch to that repo that did the awk/cpp magic to generate the backport.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

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It might be difficult for RHEL 4, which is 2.6.5 based IIRC. If the magic required is more that 500 millithaums, then an independent driver would be better.

error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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RHEL4 is based on 2.6.9.

What do you mean by "magic required is more that 500 millithaums"?

david

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I believe that was a joke :-)

Right now, we use an awk script to automatically insert a bunch of #ifdef COMPAT_xxx into the virtio drivers. Combined with a special include header, this automatically creates a new source tree from the upstream bits that can be compiled on many different kernel versions. Right now we support roughly 2.6.18-2.6.25.

The question is how far can we push this before it gets ridiculous. I'd like to try going back to 2.6.9. Posting what you have now would be helpful. If it gets too difficult, we may just have to have independent source trees for things like RHEL4.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

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I cringed a bit when you suggested the awk script route. It's quite likely that drivers for older distributions have to be manually updated as needed. I'll post my RHEL4 version in the next couple of days for comments.

thanks,
david

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A Thaum is the amount of magic required to conjure one standard white pigeon.

I meant that the amount of changes needed to port the driver to 2.6.9 is too large, the script to do automatic backporting might turn out to be less maintainable than keeping an independent source tree. We're not far from that point even for 2.6.18; for example running the script against 2.6.25-current will produce an unbuildable driver.

error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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Initial release:
- kvm-guest-drivers-linux-1
- kvm-guest-drivers-windows-1

Out of the bunch only Win2000 drivers work.

1. kvm-guest-drivers-linux-1 fail to configure themselves, while
2. XP drivers halt the VM.
I think Yan has newer XP drivers.

-Alexey, 19.3.2008

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