NAME

       hv_vmbus — Hyper-V Virtual Machine Bus (VMBus) Driver

SYNOPSIS

       To  compile  this  driver  into  the kernel, place the following lines in the system kernel configuration
       file:

             device hyperv
             device pci

DESCRIPTION

       The hv_vmbus provides a high performance communication interface between guest  and  root  partitions  in
       Hyper-V.   Hyper-V  is  a  hypervisor-based  virtualization  technology from Microsoft.  Hyper-V supports
       isolation in terms of a partition.  A partition  is  a  logical  unit  of  isolation,  supported  by  the
       hypervisor, in which operating systems execute.

       The  Microsoft  hypervisor  must  have  at  least  one parent, or root, partition, running Windows Server
       operating system.  The virtualization stack runs in the parent partition and has  direct  access  to  the
       hardware  devices.   The  root partition then creates the child partitions which host the guest operating
       systems.

       Child partitions do not have direct access to other hardware resources and are presented a  virtual  view
       of  the resources, as virtual devices (VDevs).  Requests to the virtual devices are redirected either via
       the VMBus or the hypervisor to the devices in the parent partition, which handles the requests.

       The VMBus is a logical inter-partition communication channel.  The parent partition hosts  Virtualization
       Service  Providers  (VSPs)  which  communicate over the VMBus to handle device access requests from child
       partitions.  Child partitions host Virtualization Service Consumers (VSCs) which redirect device requests
       to VSPs in the parent partition via the VMBus.  The Hyper-V  VMBus  driver  defines  and  implements  the
       interface  that  facilitate high performance bi-directional communication between the VSCs and VSPs.  All
       VSCs utilize the VMBus driver.

SEE ALSO

       hv_netvsc(4), hv_storvsc(4), hv_utils(4)

HISTORY

       Support for hv_vmbus first appeared in FreeBSD 10.0.  The driver was developed  through  a  joint  effort
       between Citrix Incorporated, Microsoft Corporation, and Network Appliance Incorporated.

AUTHORS

       FreeBSD   support   for   hv_vmbus   was   first   added  by  Microsoft  BSD  Integration  Services  Team
       <bsdic@microsoft.com>.

Debian                                         September 10, 2013                                     HYPER-V(4)