Hyper-V drivers in mainline kernel - what's next
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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 10:16 AM
While Microsoft will not support the Hyper-V drivers in the upstream in terms of commercial support, it's still worth sometimes to know what is going in the development in upstream before asking for nagging the guys for new supported driver packages for distribution supported by Microsoft. So here is a list of things that I think are worth to be mentioned - a communtiy member, not working for MS or being related into Linux kernel development:
3.1 (released, Oct '11):
- Support for VHDs or pass-through LUNs with > 2 TB
3.2 (released, Jan '12)
- hv_vmbus and hv_utils moved out of staging area! (Includes the time provider)
- hv_mouse is functional (I have seen it working)
- Functionality of hv_blkvsc moved to hv_storvsc, now controls both paravirtualized IDE & SCSI controllers
3.3
Merge window opened, new hv code present in staging-next / linux-next, will be merged after 3.2 release.
- hv_netvsc moves out of staging! (patches accepted and integrated in the "-next" branches)
- hv_storvsc adds hot add and remove of SCSI drives (like most Windows guests can do on 2008 R2 hosts)
- Promiscuous mode for hv_netvsc
- Jumbo Frames up to 64KB
Worth-to mention proposed patches:
- Move storevsc out of staging
All these patches that went into staging/next after the 3.2 merge window can be applied on top of 3.2, I am actually running such a (rc) kernel on Debian without problems. Surely this is not meant for production. But it works! So after stability issues have been fixed (yeah it really seems), we start seeing additional features. Dynamic memory is not yet part of that but I'm looking forward to some kind of hv_baloon driver some day...
- Edited by koffi2k Thursday, January 05, 2012 5:44 PM
Answers
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Thursday, December 01, 2011 11:40 PMOwner
New drivers posted today:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28188
As far as support - my team is responsive here in the forums (issues raised here I escalate to them), as well as on the various mailing lists.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.- Marked As Answer by Mike Sterling [MSFT]Owner Thursday, December 01, 2011 11:42 PM
All Replies
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Thursday, December 01, 2011 11:40 PMOwner
New drivers posted today:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28188
As far as support - my team is responsive here in the forums (issues raised here I escalate to them), as well as on the various mailing lists.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. -
Thursday, December 01, 2011 11:40 PMOwner
New drivers posted today:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28188
As far as support - my team is responsive here in the forums (issues raised here I escalate to them), as well as on the various mailing lists.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.- Marked As Answer by Mike Sterling [MSFT]Owner Thursday, December 01, 2011 11:42 PM
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Friday, December 02, 2011 6:57 AM
Hi Mike
hv_mouse now being part of Linux IS 3.2 is good news!
I basically thought this thread to be some sort of filtered source for those interested to know what is happening in upstream - by also pointing that there is no warranty all these features will trickle down into the Linux IS for RHEL/CentOS (or whatever distribution might possibly added to that list in future).
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Friday, December 02, 2011 9:32 PM
Can I just say big thank you to KY for all his current efforts on these drivers in the kernel.
I still have openSUSE with 11.4 and the included staging drivers.
uptime
21:22pm up 228 days 5:41, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05There was an issue about a year ago in vmbus but stability has been perfect in my environment but since 2.6.38 things have been good.
We are a small business and have been running hyper-v since 2008 r2 sp1 came out. Being able to run our business critical app on linux on a cluster has given us great security to what we had before.
Is it looking like everything is comming out of staging in time for the 3.3 merge window?
After everthing settles down I would like to see a solution for online backup of linux vms. Currently its a pause and resume job although we can schedule this out of hours and its only sa couple of mins.
Thanks again
Mike
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Sunday, December 04, 2011 10:35 PM
I'm quite certain hv_netvsc and hv_mouse have left staging area early enough to be merged with 3.3 (gregkh has deleted both in his staging-next tree). storvsc is proposed for removal, but that's not yet done, it depends whether it will be accepted early enough prior to the merge window of 3.3.
Live, consistent VM backups would require a VSS infrastructure inside the Linux VM, I'd not expect that to be easily integrated, as it depends more on each distribution's way to do things and less on kernel / drivers (and Linux has various file systems too). If you use VM backup with VSS, the Linux VM only needs time to save the memory to disk for pause, which take reasonably low time (but it's still a short moment of downtime, I agree)
Mike Surcouf about your uptime: Either pay attention to the security advisories of OpenSuse to be sure your system is not affected by fixes in later kernel package versions of your distribution - or you should really think about rebooting your VM into the latest kernel with security fixes. :)
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Sunday, December 25, 2011 9:12 AM
Debian's kernel team has agreed to enable all the Hyper-V modules in Linux 3.1.6 which is currently in unstable/wheezy. - Therefore: Happy testing!
Actually Debian's concerns were not due to the staging status but rather because the hv modules were regarded abaondoned for some time and one simply had to point them at the new status. (See: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=652014)- Edited by koffi2k Sunday, December 25, 2011 9:15 AM
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