On Mon, 2012-08-27 at 17:47 +0000, Tom Hanrahan wrote: > Ben, > > I know you worked with Mike Sterling earlier to integrate the Hyper-V > device drivers into the Debian Wheezy release. We really appreciate > the effort you took to do the work. Now that some customers (one in > particular, Vyatta) are starting to pick them up we're finding that > they (the users) are getting out-of-date bits. How can we best work > with you to make sure we stay at pace with changes in the drivers > further upstream in the kernel tree?
Whenever there are bug fixes or new features that you think need to be backported, you should open a bug in the Debian BTS (http://bugs.debian.org) against package 'src:linux' and the version you know is missing them. Following the feature freeze of 'wheezy', the general policy is that only important bug fixes and new hardware support can be applied. So new paravirtualisation features probably won't be acceptable, but if the kernel version currently in testing is horribly broken on Hyper-V (including terrible performance) then that can be fixed. (Note also that we are very reluctant to apply changes that have not yet been accepted by the relevant subsystem maintainer, or backports of same.) The most helpful thing you could do would be to provide already-tested patch sets against our source packages. This would allow me (or other developers) to apply your changes with a minimum of delay. The Debian kernel handbook explains how to modify and build the kernel packages <http://kernel-handbook.alioth.debian.org/ch-common-tasks.html#s-common-official> and the installer internals manual <http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/doc/internals/ch04.html> explains how to build an installer with the new kernel. > By the way, Mike has taken a new position within Microsoft. Abhishek > Gupta is now the Program Manager for our Linux device driver project. > He and I are looking forward to working with you. Bear in mind that I'm just one member of the Debian kernel team, and other developers may work on this as well. So in general you should send mail to the debian-kernel list (cc'd). All bug reports also automatically go to that list. So far I have had no access to Hyper-V and therefore no ability to test my work. I don't know if it's even possible to install under Hyper-V at present (considering commit cd006086fa5d91414d8ff9ff2b78fbb593878e3c 'ata_piix: defer disks to the Hyper-V drivers by default'). Is that something can that be tested in Azure (user providing installation images)? Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Make three consecutive correct guesses and you will be considered an expert.
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