Re: [Xen-API] [For community review] Windows PV Drivers Incubation Sub-project Proposal

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxx>]

Seems nobody had any significant comments
Will set up a formal vote next week
Lars

On 28/05/2014 13:42, Lars Kurth wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> please find attached a link to a new subproject to proposal to host 
> and develop the Windows PV drivers. The proposal is at 
> http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Windows_PV_Drivers_Incubation_Project_Proposal 
> (but I also attached the text below).
> Anyone can comment on the proposal. The review period will be open 
> until June 6th. I will then incorporate any comments and go for a 
> formal vote.
> Best Regards
> Lars
>
> == Windows PV Drivers Project Proposal ==
> === Roles ===
> * Project Lead: Paul Durrant - Paul is Windows subsystem architect for 
> XenServer and has authored the majority of the driver code.
> * Project Sponsor: Matt Wilson - Matt is Xen Project AB member 
> representing Amazon
> * Project Mentor: Lars Kurth - Lars is the Community Manager for the 
> Xen Project and has agreed to act as the project’s Mentor.
> === Background ===
> ParaVirtualization aware (PV) device drivers are an important part of 
> HVM guests running under Xen. Citrix has provided a set of PV driver
> for Windows since the inception of XenServer. These drivers have 
> evolved over the years and recently the full set has been made open
> source with a BSD license and are therefore available to the community 
> to modify and build.
> I gave a talk at the 2013 Xen Developer Summit in Edinburgh (see 
> http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/open-source-pv-drivers) to
> introduce the drivers. This proposal is intended to be a logical next 
> step to that initial offering to the community.
> === Relevance to Xen and its Community ===
> The drivers have a dependency on Xen as they are ParaVirtualization 
> aware. They are not tied in any way to Citrix commercial Xen offerings;
> they are designed to function on any build of Xen since 3.4. They 
> encompass high performance network and storage frontends and enable
> functionality such as memory ballooning, and clean shutdown or reboot 
> via the xl toolstack. They are well tested and supported, since they
> are crucial to Citrix products, and are of benefit to anyone wishing 
> to run Windows (i386 or x86_64) as a guest under Xen.
> === Current Status ===
> Recent builds of the drivers are currently being tested by Citrix and 
> Amazon using the Microsoft HCK and Citrix will be providing 
> logo-signed builds of the drivers in future commercial Xen offerings. 
> Amazon are evaluating the drivers and may ship them in future AMIs.
> Citrix may also provide logo-signed drivers via Microsoft's Windows 
> Update mechanism, making them widely available to anyone running
> Windows under Xen (not just XenServer) without the need for them to 
> build the drivers themselves. Any other organization is also free to do
> the same by registering a top level PV device with the Xen community 
> (see http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=blob;f=docs/misc/pci-d
> evice-reservations.txt) and logo-signing their driver builds.
>
> === Incubation ===
> The aim of making the Windows PV Drivers an incubated project is to 
> raise their profile to members of the Xen community other than Citrix
> and Amazon and hopefully gain more developer interest and 
> contribution. The driver set provide APIs to fundamental Xen 
> subsystems such
> as grant tables, event channels and xenstore and therefore provide a 
> basis for further frontends, e.g. HID (keyboard and mouse), PV audio
> and possibly framebuffer. Current maintainers of the driver 
> repositories are all employed by Citrix but by becoming an incubated 
> project we
> hope gain maintainers from the community as we build interest.
>
> We hope we can work with the maintainers of the GPLPV Windows Drivers 
> to standardize Windows PV drivers for the Xen project.
> === Required Infrastructure ===
> ==== Repositories ====
> As a Xen Project sub-project we would wish the driver repositories to 
> be hosted on xenbits, but mirrored to GitHub to allow use of the the
> GitHub workflow. It makes sense to maintain a separate repository for 
> each driver as:
> Each driver is separately installable with no compile-time linkage to 
> any other driver. Some headers may be imported from one
> repository to another to facilitate run-time discovery of interfaces 
> provided by one driver and consumed by another, but it is desirable
> that this is an explicit step to move from one version of an interface 
> to another.
> A continuous integration server project can be created for each 
> repository such that the only a modified driver is re-built, rather than
> the entire set.
>
> The set of drivers (and hence repositories) is currently:
> * XENBUS: Bus driver binding to the top-level PCI device (and 
> providing most of the interfaces to Xen)
> * XENVIF: Network class driver (hosting the code necessary to drive 
> the netif ring protocol)
> * XENNET: Network device driver (client of the class driver, provides 
> VIFs to Windows network stack)
> * XENVBD: Storage class driver (hosting the code necessary to drive 
> the blkif ring protocol)
> * XENIFACE: Interface driver (providing user-space access to xenstore)
>
> ==== Build and Test ====
> We request build infrastructure to make new builds of driver 
> repositories immediately available for use by community members. This
> includes:
>
> A build machine (physical or virtual), possibly part of the Xen 
> Project test framework, running Jenkins or some such continuous
> integration server to monitor the repositories
>
> A license for Microsoft Visual Studio (~ $1000)
> Storage, either on the build machine or elsewhere, to act as a public 
> facing symbol server for the convenience of developers
> ===== Approval Status =====
> The Advisory Board agreed to fund a Visual Studio license and two 
> vendors in the community offered VM's to host the build environment.

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