Linux Virtualization - Jul 2009 - [patch 00/54] [Announce] Microsoft Hyper-V drivers for Linux

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce, that after many months of discussions, Microsoft
has released their Hyper-V Linux drivers under the GPLv2.  Following
this message, will be the patches that add the drivers to the
drivers/staging/ tree, and a whole bunch of cleanups.

It's taken a long road to get here, and I'd like to thank the following
people who made this possible:
  - Steve Hemminger for the initial prodding and extreme patience
  - Hank Janssen for providing the code and working with me to get it
    into a workable and semi-mergable state.  His involvement within
    Microsoft was also invaluable.
  - Sam Ramji for his push within Microsoft to make this happen in a
    manner that works with the Linux community.
  - Novell for sponsoring my work on the Linux Driver project, without
    which, this would not have even been possible.
And there are many others both within Novell and Microsoft, who I do not
want to slight by not naming, but the list would be too long to go into.

These drivers are to enable Linux to work better when running as a guest
on top of the Hyper-V system.  There is still a lot of work to do in
getting this into "proper" mergable state, and moving it out of the
staging directory, but Hank and I will be undertaking this task.  See
the TODO file in the drivers/staging/hv/ directory if anyone wishes to
help out with this task.

The code should be showing up in the linux-next tree soon, as the
patches are now in my public tree.

If anyone has any questions about this code, please let me and Hank know
about it.

thanks,

greg k-h

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 09:00:25AM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman
wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm happy to announce, that after many months of discussions, Microsoft
> has released their Hyper-V Linux drivers under the GPLv2.  Following
> this message, will be the patches that add the drivers to the
> drivers/staging/ tree, and a whole bunch of cleanups.
Hm, for some reason my scripts to send patches out caused them to get
eaten by the very good lkml filters.  (note, it was my fault, not
lkml's).

So instead of trying to send them again, and spaming everyone who
already got them, you can find them in my staging tree at:
	http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/gregkh-2.6/gregkh-05-staging/

If anyone wants me to post any of the individual 54 patches to them,
please let me know.

thanks,

greg k-h

On Monday 2009-07-20 18:00, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>
>I'm happy to announce, that after many months of discussions, Microsoft
>has released their Hyper-V Linux drivers under the GPLv2.  Following
>this message, will be the patches that add the drivers to the
>drivers/staging/ tree, and a whole bunch of cleanups.
>
>It's taken a long road to get here, and I'd like to thank the
following
>people who made this possible:
>  - Steve Hemminger for the initial prodding and extreme patience
>  - Hank Janssen for providing the code and working with me to get it
>    into a workable and semi-mergable state.  His involvement within
>    Microsoft was also invaluable.
>  - Sam Ramji for his push within Microsoft to make this happen in a
>    manner that works with the Linux community.
>  - Novell for sponsoring my work on the Linux Driver project, without
>    which, this would not have even been possible.
(Your title as Maintainer of Crap has been well earned. But crap
should not be maintained, it should be improved.)


I took a random patch to look at
(add-the-hyper-v-virtual-network-driver.patch to be precise). I think
the /hv/ subdirectory name should be expanded a little (to, say,
/hyper-v/); we're not in the Unix days anymore where space is at such
a premium that people even strip the last e off /usr. Our wireless
drivers also don't live in /wl/. And since hv does not seem to be
related to a hypervisor?? cf. sunhv.c.


As for the code? I was immediately greeted by the screaming-uppercase
typedef crap jungle that is so redundant[1] yet typical in many
commercial products. One may hope that the evolution of the posted
hyper-v code brings a coding strategy breeze into the house of
Microsoft.

[1] DWORD they could have replaced by uint32_t once it became
available via C99's stdint.h. The LPCSTR crap only makes sense if you
are a lazy typist, but I would not call code doing things like LPCSTR
clean. At least it's one thing - consistent. Consistently hard to
read, though.

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:24:24PM +0200, Jan Engelhardt
wrote:
> 
> On Monday 2009-07-20 18:00, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> >
> >I'm happy to announce, that after many months of discussions,
Microsoft
> >has released their Hyper-V Linux drivers under the GPLv2.  Following
> >this message, will be the patches that add the drivers to the
> >drivers/staging/ tree, and a whole bunch of cleanups.
> >
> >It's taken a long road to get here, and I'd like to thank the
following
> >people who made this possible:
> >  - Steve Hemminger for the initial prodding and extreme patience
> >  - Hank Janssen for providing the code and working with me to get it
> >    into a workable and semi-mergable state.  His involvement within
> >    Microsoft was also invaluable.
> >  - Sam Ramji for his push within Microsoft to make this happen in a
> >    manner that works with the Linux community.
> >  - Novell for sponsoring my work on the Linux Driver project, without
> >    which, this would not have even been possible.
> 
> (Your title as Maintainer of Crap has been well earned. But crap
> should not be maintained, it should be improved.)
Hey, we've been working on this, if you look at the .31 merge, we got
rid of more code than we added in the staging directory, and I have a
patch to remove another driver queued up to go to Linus before the final
.31 release as well.

So don't think it's just crap coming in and nothing coming out :)
> I took a random patch to look at
> (add-the-hyper-v-virtual-network-driver.patch to be precise). I think
> the /hv/ subdirectory name should be expanded a little (to, say,
> /hyper-v/); we're not in the Unix days anymore where space is at such
> a premium that people even strip the last e off /usr. Our wireless
> drivers also don't live in /wl/. And since hv does not seem to be
> related to a hypervisor?? cf. sunhv.c.
Sure, names are just names, I don't really care about this, I just
picked 'hv' as it was easy to type...
> As for the code? I was immediately greeted by the screaming-uppercase
> typedef crap jungle that is so redundant[1] yet typical in many
> commercial products. One may hope that the evolution of the posted
> hyper-v code brings a coding strategy breeze into the house of
> Microsoft.
> 
> [1] DWORD they could have replaced by uint32_t once it became
> available via C99's stdint.h. The LPCSTR crap only makes sense if you
> are a lazy typist, but I would not call code doing things like LPCSTR
> clean. At least it's one thing - consistent. Consistently hard to
> read, though.
Look at the further patches in the series, I get rid of that typedef.

And yes, there's lots left to do, see the TODO file for details if you
are interested in helping out.

thanks,

greg k-h

* Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh at suse.de> [2009-07-20 09:00:25]:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm happy to announce, that after many months of discussions, Microsoft
> has released their Hyper-V Linux drivers under the GPLv2.  Following
> this message, will be the patches that add the drivers to the
> drivers/staging/ tree, and a whole bunch of cleanups.
> 
> It's taken a long road to get here, and I'd like to thank the
following
> people who made this possible:
>   - Steve Hemminger for the initial prodding and extreme patience
>   - Hank Janssen for providing the code and working with me to get it
>     into a workable and semi-mergable state.  His involvement within
>     Microsoft was also invaluable.
>   - Sam Ramji for his push within Microsoft to make this happen in a
>     manner that works with the Linux community.
>   - Novell for sponsoring my work on the Linux Driver project, without
>     which, this would not have even been possible.
> And there are many others both within Novell and Microsoft, who I do not
> want to slight by not naming, but the list would be too long to go into.
> 
> These drivers are to enable Linux to work better when running as a guest
> on top of the Hyper-V system.  There is still a lot of work to do in
> getting this into "proper" mergable state, and moving it out of
the
> staging directory, but Hank and I will be undertaking this task.  See
> the TODO file in the drivers/staging/hv/ directory if anyone wishes to
> help out with this task.
>
What is the long term strategy to keep the sources in sync? Is there
one? Do you expect to get updates for these sources? 

-- 
	Balbir

>What is the long term strategy to keep the sources in sync? Is there
>one? Do you expect to get updates for these sources?
>
>        Balbir

Balbir,

I think you are asking me if we plan to continue contributing?

It is my plan to use the kernel as my primary development area, and I will
Continue to provide Greg with updates. First step is to clean up the code
To make sure if fulfills all Kernel coding standards and requirements.

Then I will start contributing new functionality.

Thanks,

Hank.

* Hank Janssen <hjanssen at microsoft.com> [2009-07-21 18:00:10]:
> 
> 
> >What is the long term strategy to keep the sources in sync? Is there
> >one? Do you expect to get updates for these sources?
> >
> >        Balbir
> 
> 
> Balbir,
> 
> I think you are asking me if we plan to continue contributing?
> 
> It is my plan to use the kernel as my primary development area, and I will
> Continue to provide Greg with updates. First step is to clean up the code
> To make sure if fulfills all Kernel coding standards and requirements.
> 
> Then I will start contributing new functionality.
>
Good to know. Thanks for the clarification! 

-- 
	Balbir