[libvirt-users] libvirt and linux-vserver

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 12:18:26PM +0100, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:
> The 21/11/11, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 
> > We're always open to accepting new drivers - we have almost every
> > major HV technology covered to some degreee now. There was a patch
> > for vserver posted here:
> > 
> > https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2008-January/msg00097.html
> > 
> > with some review of the code, but there were not any followup postings
> > for it. So what's lacking is someone motivated todo the work to finish
> > it off & update to latest libvirt coding standards for drivers. Volunteers
> > are welcome to submit vserver support to libvir-list again....
> 
> I would have to second such a call until I realized the last Windows KVM
> virtio drivers are not freely available anymore (v1.2.0 & v1.3.3 of the
> drivers are distributed with a proprietary license instead of the GPLv2
> for the previous versions). Looks like Redhat is going to close
> contributions in the virtualization world.

There is in fact *not* an attempt by Red Hat to keep the Windows drivers
closed-source, but there are a couple of factors which might have
mistakenly given that impression.

The KVM wiki link to the GIT repository was outdated. The master GIT
repository now lives on GIT Hub:

  https://github.com/YanVugenfirer/kvm-guest-drivers-windows

I have updated the wiki accordingly:

  http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers


For reasons I don't understand, the binary releases published to Fedora
download page are (unfortunately) using a different version numbering
scheme to the RHEL binaries. So while Fedora shows release 1.1.16, RHEL
will show 1.4. They both ultimately come from source in the same GIT
repo I mention above. The Fedora link is on the download page above

Finally, although the source code is GPL, the binary signed & WHQL'd
drivers provided for RHEL are not under the GPL. This is due to license
restrictions of the MicroSoft WHQL certification process :-( This is
one of the reasons why we can't distribute the drivers in Fedora YUM
repos directly.

Regards,
Daniel
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