XenVbd - The XenServer Paravitual Storage Class Driver for Windows

The XenVbd package consists of two single device drivers:

• xenvbd.sys is a STORPORT miniport driver which attaches to a virtual device created by XenBus (see https://github.com/xenserver/win-xenbus) and creates a child device for each VBD for the generic disk driver to attach to. It is also a protocol driver for the blkif wire protocol (see include\xen\io\blkif.h).

• xencrsh.sys is a driver which provides the necessary code to write a crashdump out to the paravirtual backend in the event of a BugCheck.

Quick Start Guide

Building the driver

First you'll need a device driver build environment for Windows 8. For this you must use:

• Visual Studio 2012 (Professional or Ultimate)
• Windows Driver Kit 8

(See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/hh852365.aspx). You may find it useful to install VirtualCloneDrive from http://www.slysoft.com as Visual Studio is generally supplied in ISO form.

Install Visual Studio first (you only need install MFC for C++) and then the WDK. Set an environment variable called VS to the base of the Visual Studio Installation (e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0) and a variable called KIT to the base of the WDK (e.g. C:\Program Files\Windows Kits\8.0). Also set an environment variable called SYMBOL_SERVER to point at a location where driver symbols can be stored. This can be local directory e.g. C:\Symbols.

Next you'll need a 3.x version of python (which you can get from http://www.python.org). Make sure python.exe is somewhere on your default path.

Now fire up a Command Prompt and navigate to the base of your git repository. At the prompt type:

build.py checked

This will create a debug build of the driver. To create a non-debug build type:

build.py free

Installing the driver

See INSTALL.md

Miscellaneous

For convenience the source repository includes some other scripts:

kdfiles.py

This generates two files called kdfiles32.txt and kdfiles64.txt which can be used as map files for the .kdfiles WinDBG command.

sdv.py

This runs Static Driver Verifier on the source.

clean.py

This removes any files not checked into the repository and not covered by the .gitignore file.

get_xen_headers.py

This will import any necessary headers from a given tag of that Xen repository at git://xenbits.xen.org/xen.git.