RE: [Xen-devel] writing PV block drivers for Windows

["James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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)?

Haven't had as much time as I'd like but things are progressing. I'm
still not sure that the windows side of the block device implementation
is really the correct way to do things...

I need to (yet again) rehash the code that enumerates block devices, and
once I'm happy with that I'll actually have to write some grant table
code, which is probably the main thing missing.

What is implemented:
. A Windows driver for the XenPCI device (eg loads and attaches to it,
and provides interfaces for the other drivers to talk to)
. Hypervisor calls (well... some of them... I'm just adding new ones as
I need them)
. A very basic event channel infrastructure
. A very basic xen bus infrastructure (list, read, watch, unwatch, etc)
. Creation of PDO's for everything returned by 'ls device' (xbd, xif,
etc) - windows then goes looking for drivers to attach to these
. The start of a disk class driver for xbd, which in turn enumerates
what is under device/xbd (eg 768, 5632, etc)

What is not implemented
. Grant table code
. The rest of the disk class driver
. An interface for usermode stuff to be able to talk to the kernel
driver
. A usermode service to monitor shutdown events (no documented way to do
a clean shutdown from kernel mode)
. drivers for network, console, vfb, etc - even if they're just dummy
drivers for now to stop windows asking for them

The pci driver contains the xenbus, event channel, and hypervisor stuff.
Ideally it would provide a ring buffer abstraction too, so the lower
drivers could just send and receive ringbuffer level events... I'll have
to look at a better way of doing that.

If I get time I'll put all the GPL stuff in each source file and put it
up somewhere, but probably not this week.

Thanks

James



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