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Great news, especially the guest shutdown/reboot ability that sometimes doesn't work with GPLPV drivers (though I haven't tried the latest).

An welcome feature would be an installer/uninstaller utility that can cleanly remove (or upgrade) the drivers. The fact that these are signed drivers is another important bonus (though there are some - old - signed GPLPV drivers available).

It would also be important to include instructions on how to replace/remove already installed GPLPV drivers and install these new drivers.

On Thursday, May 29, 2014 10:14 AM, Adam Goryachev <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 28/05/14 22:42, Lars Kurth wrote:
> === 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.
>
How do the quality of the citrix drivers compare to the existing GPLPV
drivers? I'm assuming two distinct code bases will have distinct bugs,
as well as features.

> We hope we can work with the maintainers of the GPLPV Windows Drivers
> to standardize Windows PV drivers for the Xen project.

How do you propose this will happen? Is there some idea on how the two
drivers code base can be merged, or do you propose to discard the
existing GPLPV drivers? I'd like to hear some more discussion around
this issue.

PS, I think it is great news that citrix has moved to release the
drivers, and share in this way.

Regards,
Adam

--
Adam Goryachev
Website Managers
www.websitemanagers.com.au

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