Microsoft contributes open source Linux drivers for Hyper-V

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Microsoft announced today that it has contributed 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel community. The code contribution, a Linux device driver, will be published on CodePlex, and will be immediately available to the Linux Community and customers, enabling any distribution of the Linux operating system to be virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.

This is significant for a couple reasons: The Hyper-V Linux device drivers enable Linux machines to run as virtual machines on top of Hyper-V. Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. Second, this marks the first time Microsoft is directly contributing code to the Linux kernel. Microsoft has made the long term commitment to update and maintain this code over time as the next versions of the Linux kernel are released.

For more, check out the Channel 9 video, the Virtualization Team Blog -- Microsoft and Red Hat Cooperative Technical Support, and the Microsoft Open Source site.

 

More to come,

Mitch

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