Xen users - Feb 2008 - windows pv drivers released at www.halsign.com

This startup released the package of some windows pv drivers and service.
I had tried on my rhel5.x, the experience of windows hvm is good.


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This startup released the package of some windows pv drivers and service.
I had tried on my rhel5.x, the experience of windows hvm is good.


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z en schreef:
> This startup released the package of some windows pv drivers and service.
> I had tried on my rhel5.x, the experience of windows hvm is good.
I hope that James checks this binaries for possible ''use''.


Stefan
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On Sat, 2008-02-16 at 03:50 +0100, Stefan de Konink
wrote:
> z en schreef:
> > This startup released the package of some windows pv drivers and
service.
> > I had tried on my rhel5.x, the experience of windows hvm is good.
> 
> I hope that James checks this binaries for possible
''use''.
I took a look and I don''t think they cribbed anything from the gplpv
drivers.

But did the world really need *another* closed-source set of winpv
drivers? By my count this is #4. Maybe things looked different back in
August when they started when they could perhaps undercut the other
vendors on price, but the gplpv drivers are maturing rapidly and are
FREE.

I''d like to renew my call to Halsign as well as the other vendors to
give up on these drivers as "value-add" and pitch in improving gplpv.
We
can all then get on with writing something NEW.

Regards -- Andy



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On Friday 15 February 2008 09:50:04 pm Stefan de Konink
wrote:
> z en schreef:
> > This startup released the package of some windows pv drivers and
service.
> > I had tried on my rhel5.x, the experience of windows hvm is good.
>
> I hope that James checks this binaries for possible
''use''.
Checking the install instructions: ( 
http://www.halsign.com/documents/Gatekeeper-Tools-install-guide.txt )

He has host & guest components to install. On the host (Redhat 5.0 tested, 
SuSE, etc. to follow) he provides kernel-xen-2.6.18-53.1.4.gk1.i686.rpm, and 
xen-{,libs-}3.0.3-41.gk1.i386.rpm, and a package called gkhost. Since most 
distros support higher versions, this would be a downgrade. Possibly you 
could get things to work with his versions, then re-upgrade, and adjust. His 
guest tools only support 32-bit, unlike James'' version. I suppose
that''s
because xen 3.1.0 is really preferred for 64 bit.

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On Saturday 16 February 2008 07:08:19 am Jim Burns
wrote:
> On Saturday 16 February 2008 07:05:55 am you wrote:
> > Checking the install instructions: (
> > http://www.halsign.com/documents/Gatekeeper-Tools-install-guide.txt )
>
> Also, his site seems to download at modem speeds.
And the service installed by his gkhost rpm doesn''t run properly on
fedora or
SuSE, yet (Redhat tested only). The init.d script doesn''t even install
in the
right place on SuSE (follows the wrong symlink) and depends on fedora/redhat 
init functions, so some hacking required. And I didn''t see a link for
source
code for his GPL-ed package on his web site or Readme.

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> > On Saturday 16 February 2008 07:05:55 am you wrote:
> > > Checking the install instructions: (
> > >
http://www.halsign.com/documents/Gatekeeper-Tools-install-guide.txt
)
> >
> > Also, his site seems to download at modem speeds.
> 
> And the service installed by his gkhost rpm doesn''t run properly
on
fedora
> or
> SuSE, yet (Redhat tested only). The init.d script doesn''t even
install
in
> the
> right place on SuSE (follows the wrong symlink) and depends on
> fedora/redhat
> init functions, so some hacking required. And I didn''t see a link
for
> source
> code for his GPL-ed package on his web site or Readme.
> 
Do we know the license for these drivers? I haven''t looked closely but
I
don''t remember GPL being mentioned anywhere.
>From the symbols defined in the .sys files it looks like some code might
have been copied from minios, but the license on minios appears to be
"do anything you want with this, we don''t care".

James

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On Saturday 16 February 2008 08:03:29 am you wrote:
> Do we know the license for these drivers? I haven''t looked closely
but I
> don''t remember GPL being mentioned anywhere.
At least as far as the host portion goes, look at ''COPYING''
unpacked from his
gkhost-1.0-i386-for-rhel5.tar. I haven''t looked at his guest portion
yet,
Gatekeeper-GTools-1.0.exe. I''d have to provision another guest, to be
sure
there is no interaction between his stuff & yours, find some space for it, 
etc. Then there''s the whole ''1.0'' fear :-)

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On Saturday 16 February 2008 09:46:40 am Jim Burns
wrote:
> On Saturday 16 February 2008 08:03:29 am James Harper wrote:
> > Do we know the license for these drivers? I haven''t looked
closely but I
> > don''t remember GPL being mentioned anywhere.
>
> At least as far as the host portion goes, look at
''COPYING'' unpacked from
> his gkhost-1.0-i386-for-rhel5.tar. I haven''t looked at his guest
portion
> yet, Gatekeeper-GTools-1.0.exe. I''d have to provision another
guest, to be
> sure there is no interaction between his stuff & yours, find some space
for
> it, etc. Then there''s the whole ''1.0'' fear :-)
Well, I tried out the Halsign drivers. The Windows license is confusing. It 
appears parts are GPL, parts are not. It''s not clear which is which.

The structure of the drivers is very similar to yours. Scsi drivers, a new 
network interface, and various system devices (a bus device and a
''comm''
device). For some reason, I have a second cdrom device in My Computer, even 
tho'' I only defined one in my config.

Both network interfaces are active the first time you boot into his
''/pv''
version of the os, and you have to disable the slower 100MB one, leaving the 
1Gb one active. Both Qemu and scsi devices seem to be active, but a system 
msg in the event viewer from PartMgr reads ''Disk 0 will not be used
because
it is a redundant path for disk 1.'', so maybe he got around having both
active another way. No corruption so far, but it''s early yet :-)

The 1Gb network interface is about twice as fast as the 100Mb one in my domu 
to dom0 file copy, and no BSOD. An intra domu file copy was the same on both 
booting w/ /pv and w/o. However, I had to find space on nfs for the test 
system, so I was not really expecting a speedup there, and this would not be 
a fair test of the scsi drivers.

The guest portion drivers installed w/o the host service having been installed 
yet. I did install the host portion later, and I still don''t see
it''s point.

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On Sunday 17 February 2008 10:44:55 pm you wrote:
> The guest portion drivers installed w/o the host service having been
> installed yet. I did install the host portion later, and I still
don''t see
> it''s point.
Oh, and I didn''t need to install his kernel 2.6.18/ xen 3.0.3 stuff,
just his
gkhost rpm - it works fine with the standard fc8 xen stuff. And since the 
host service so far seems irrelevent, the .exe should work on any xen windows 
xpsp2 or 2k3 guest, not just for fedora/redhat based distros.

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Yes, the guest portion can work without updating the kernel/xen stuff,
but you will achieve BETTER performance if you have both installed.


On 2/18/08, jim burns <jim_burn@bellsouth.net>
wrote:
>
> On Sunday 17 February 2008 10:44:55 pm you wrote:
> > The guest portion drivers installed w/o the host service having been
> > installed yet. I did install the host portion later, and I still
don''t
> see
> > it''s point.
>
> Oh, and I didn''t need to install his kernel 2.6.18/ xen 3.0.3
stuff, just
> his
> gkhost rpm - it works fine with the standard fc8 xen stuff. And since the
> host service so far seems irrelevent, the .exe should work on any xen
> windows
> xpsp2 or 2k3 guest, not just for fedora/redhat based distros.
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

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