Xen devel - Jan 2009 - RE: Maturity of Xen PV drivers?

> Hi James,
>   Do you know any company has used Xen PV drivers for Windows in their
> production?  Or Is there any limitation for those drivers (list of
know
> issues etc.)
> 
I haven''t had any issues in quite a while (12 months, various
versions),
and I use them in production (the machines are well backed up of course.
In fact the only problems I have had under windows was when _not_ using
PV drivers - a Xen/Dom0 crash left one of my windows domains corrupt
because of the way Dom0 caches disk writes in the qemu drivers.

XP appears to have some network hang issues under really high load,
which I''m just about to release a fix for (and the TPR patch which
allows XP to actually achieve the high load in the first place).

I still get reports of issues with network task offload (checksum and
large send), which I think is more a Linux issue than one with my
drivers, but those options are easy enough to turn off. I think it is
more an issue with the Linux hardware device driver itself, and I don''t
have any hardware for which the problems have been reported...

James

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>> Hi James,
>>   Do you know any company has used Xen PV drivers for Windows in their
>> production?  Or Is there any limitation for those drivers (list of know
>>  issues etc.)
>>     
> I haven''t had any issues in quite a while (12 months, various
versions),
> and I use them in production (the machines are well backed up of course.
> In fact the only problems I have had under windows was when _not_ using
> PV drivers - a Xen/Dom0 crash left one of my windows domains corrupt
> because of the way Dom0 caches disk writes in the qemu drivers.
>   
Same thing here - we have a Xen host (64 bits) running a couple of 
Windows 2003 VMs.
Without the GPL PV drivers, heavy I/O caused almost-reproducible crashes 
(for instance, downloading a large file thru CIFS hung the Windows VM).
With the GPL PV drivers, I/O is of course *a lot* faster and no crash 
has been seen yet.

HTH,

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