[Xen-users] [For community review] Windows PV Drivers Incubation Sub-project Proposal

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxx>]

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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