Citrix Project Satori

Project Satori is the result of a collaborative agreement between XenSource and Microsoft, and was carried forward after XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems. The base Satori components are released by Microsoft as the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V, and provide support for paravirtualized XenLinux guests running on Hyper-V. The Linux Integration Components can be downloaded here.

A major usability issue with the original Satori project is around Hyper-V's handling of input devices. When accessing the console of a Hyper-V host via Terminal Services or Remote Desktop there is no mouse support available for the consoles of non-paravirtualized ("unenlightened") guests, and accessing the host console directly results in a "captured" mouse experience for guest consoles that is difficult to use. This is true for both Windows and Linux guests, and Microsoft provides an enlightened mouse driver along with disk and network drivers for Windows guests. As a result Citrix agreed to develop a enlightened mouse driver for Linux guests running on Hyper-V, known as the InputVSC driver, which is released here.

The InputVSC driver requires the Linux Integration Components to be installed, and supports the same guest distro versions.

To install the InputVSC driver: (you must be root:)

1. Download and attach the .ISO file to a Hyper-V guest with the Linux Integration Components already installed.

2. Copy the contents of the .ISO to the desired directory

3. Run setup.pl with the inputdriver argument:

# ./setup.pl inputdriver

License Information

The InputVSC driver is a combination of source code (top half, Linux-facing) and proprietary binary bits (bottom half, Hyper-V-facing). This program is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. For clarity, the licensor of this program does not intend that a "derivative work" include code which compiles header information from this program.

Code Download