Re: writing PV block drivers for Windows

[Pezza <mario.beccia@tiscali.it>]

James,

I'd be pretty much interested in the evolution this thing had (1 month has
passed...).
Have you got anything functional? Do you need any help with it (I'd be
extremely interested in this)?




James Harper wrote:
> 
> I'm now at the stage where I can think about writing some PV block
> drivers for Windows. I have working event channel and xen store
> subsystems (but they'll probably need some more refinement once things
> progress), and the Windows XenPCI driver enumerates devices as they are
> added to xenstore.
> 
> This leaves me with a few questions...
> 
> 1. I assume that the qemu virtual BIOS uses the virtual ATA for
> communications. Once my Windows drivers are loaded at boot time (part of
> the bootstrap process I assume), I need to turn off the emulated ATA
> interface so that windows doesn't detect that (two access methods to the
> same block device can't be a good idea!)... how might I get xen/qemu to
> turn that off at a given point... by writing something into xenstore?
>  
> 2. I'm presently planning on writing the vbd driver as a Windows SCSI
> miniport driver, which means windows would see the vbd driver as a scsi
> disk. It appears that Xen has a fairly simple idea of single block
> devices, without the concept of buses and controllers. Windows, however,
> likes controller buses with devices hanging off them. So I can create
> one virtual scsi HBA, and just put all the virtual devices on that, or I
> can create one virtual HBA per virtual device... any suggestions? I'm
> not sure that it really matters either way, although the first way seems
> like it would be tidier...
> 
> 3. Would the xen list admins consider a new mailing list for a gpl'd
> windows pv driver development? Would you consider providing a place to
> host it under the source control you use (I forget which one :)? Failing
> that I'll just put it up on SourceForge.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> James
> 
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> 
> 

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