Re: Windows GPL PV Drivers 0.9.9-pre2

[Joost van den Broek <jvandenbroek@gmail.com>]

James Harper schreef:
> I've just uploaded a prerelease of 0.9.9 to
> http://www.meadowcourt.org/downloads/
>
> Please read the following before using:
>
> It fixes a few disk related bugs... I've just been testing it on a
> Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 I have just restored from tape
> into a DomU from a backup of a physical system and it's working fine -
> 0.9.8 BSOD'd almost immediately and then left me with a corrupt
> filesystem, so that not happening with 0.9.9 is a good sign. Also,
> hdtune now works for me without any problems, although performance is
> sucky because it uses unaligned memory buffers.
>
> The thing that's bugging me at the moment is how to make upgrades from
> previous versions work nicely. Part of the problem is that some of the
> drivers BSOD on close sometimes, which I should be able to fix if I can
> catch it happening, but the main problem is that xenpci 0.9.8 (probably)
> isn't going to work with xennet 0.9.9, and when windows upgrades the
> drivers it will know that it has to upgrade xenpci next boot so it
> defers it (because xenvbd is using it to manage the system drive), but
> knows that it can upgrade xennet now, which introduces the version
> mismatches. 
>
> I think booting without gplpv, performing the upgrade, then booting with
> gplpv again might be a workaround but I'm not even sure if that will
> work reliably, although probably more from the driver bugs.
>
> In previous versions it would also have been sufficient just to copy the
> .sys files to system32\drivers, but even that won't work with this
> version as there is a new device filter installed for xenvbd (and soon
> xenscsi), and there are associated .inf file updates.
>
> Any and all suggestions greatly appreciated. Any testing anyone can do
> to tell me what works and what doesn't also appreciated, at least then I
> can document it on the wiki.
>
> Thanks
>
> James
>   
Thanks James, seems like these drivers are again a little bit faster 
than before. Now I can run JkDefrag and HDtune without BSOD's so that's 
very nice. Interesting to see is that JkDefrag's drive analyse seems to 
be much faster done now than with 0.9.6.

Joost