Re: White screen

[Mark Clarkson <mark.clarkson-Sphq+rzYrv710XsdtD+oqA@public.gmane.org>]

On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 10:07 +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> We intend, at first, to improve fully virtualized performance as far
> as 
> we are able, without resorting to paravirtualized drivers.
> 
> Should performance not be satisfactory to our needs, we may write 
> paravirtualized devices and drivers.  If we do so, I can't commit as
> to 
> whether the paravirtualized Windows drivers will be open or not (I'm
> not 
> saying the drivers will be closed -- just that no decision has been
> made).
> 
> However, if you (or anyone) is interested in writing paravirtulized 
> drivers, we will work with you towards merging them into the kernel
> and 
> into the kvm distribution.  We welcome such contributions and will 
> cooperate fully. 

Unfortunately the slow network performance and the fact that, on my
setup at least, network io takes 100% of a single core means that kvm is
not currently useful for server use.

I really like the idea of kvm over Xen as it's a much 'cleaner' solution
and would dearly love to see paravirtualised network drivers, at least
for Linux guests, which would allow me to consider moving from Xen to
kvm.

Do you think it possible/probable for someone with around 10 years
knowledge of Linux and C programming but with no kernel module writing
experience to be able to write a paravirtualised network driver for
linux in under 6 months (in his/her spare time)? Is there any example
code around for this? Would it be a case of say, modifying an ne2k
driver? In fact, I've literally just seen that paravirtualised drivers
exist for xen for linux 2.6 kernels and I presume these are open source
- could these be used in some way?


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