Microsoft Is Still Working On Hyper-V Linux Drivers

Microsoft engineers are still actively working on open-source Linux kernel drivers.

Going back to the summer of 2009, Microsoft has been writing drivers for Linux. More specifically, Microsoft has been working on mainline Linux kernel drivers for their Hyper-V virtualization platform so that Linux guests may run fine atop their Windows Server hosts.

For a while the Microsoft Hyper-V drivers in the Linux kernel staging tree weren't too well maintained and at risk of being dropped, but three years later they are still advancing their Hyper-V Linux support.

As the latest Microsoft patch hitting the Linux kernel mailing list is introducing a Hyper-V balloon driver for their virtualization platform. The Hyper-V balloon driver takes advantage of dynamic memory management supported via Windows hosts. Ballooning allows for growing and shrinking the amount of RAM that is exposed to guest virtual machines on a dynamic basis. Microsoft is also planning to work out memory hot-add support for Linux on Hyper-V too. VMware and others have already supported memory ballooning under Linux.

This latest Microsoft Linux kernel contribution can be found here on the kernel mailing list.

Microsoft officially supports Hyper-V on Linux for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS with their GPL-licensed virtualization drivers.

For some related Microsoft Linux reading, see Microsoft's Lessons Learned From Linux and Microsoft: The Unlikely Sponsor Of Linux.