05 March 2010, 12:11

Microsoft releases Hyper-V drivers for RHEL

Microsoft has updated its "Linux Integration Components for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V" to include network and storage drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4. The drivers are to improve the performance of RHEL5 guest systems on Microsoft Windows hosts with Hyper-V support and are related to the drivers the vendor released under the GPL last July.

Like the drivers for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES/SLED), which are also included in the package, the drivers for RHEL only work with one (virtual) CPU. The technet blog says that Microsoft fully supports the drivers; Red Hat apparently provides best effort support for systems with such drivers, but applies certain rules explained in Red Hat's knowledge base to the use of third party kernel drivers.

This situation is only likely to change if Red Hat incorporates the Hyper-V drivers in RHEL – for example the drivers released under the GPL that are kept in the Linux kernel's staging branch for immature and unfinished drivers of insufficient quality. However, development for these drivers shows only halting progress, as twice before the responsible Microsoft developers have appeared to abandon their work.

(trk)

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