Microsoft Writes GPL Drivers For Linux Guests On Hyper-V

Microsoft has published drivers for running Linux virtual machines on Hyper-V. 

“Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V”.

This means that potentially any Linux operating system could run with maximum performance provided by the integration components.  There would be no messy (it’s actually quite easy – even for a penguin-phobe like me) IC installation.  You can run any XEN enabled Linux on Hyper-V using synthetic drivers but they don’t perform as well as enlightened OS’s with integration components for the underlying hypervisor devices.  Right now, we have support for SUSE SLES.  RedHat support is on the way.  But this announcement will open the floodgates for things like Ubuntu (expected to dominate in the third world) and CentOS (dominates the hosting world).

I suspect Microsoft will still have support statements.  For example, MS has a mutual support operation in place with SLES on Hyper-V.  You can call MS PSS with an issue and they can forward it to Novell.  They won’t have that for CentOS.

Well done Hyper-V team!

EDIT #1:

This is the announcement video.  It’s interesting to see how committed MS is to open source.  I was familiar with most of it but never stopped to consider the sum of their efforts.