latest windows-in-domU driver wisdom?

[Jeff Rizzo <riz%tastylime.net@localhost>]

I find myself in the unfortunate position of having to run a windows 10 
domU.  (dom0 is NetBSD 9.2, which is why I'm writing here).  I'd love 
some guidance from anyone else in this position; I've been Googling in 
the wider world of Xen for this stuff for the last couple days and keep 
coming up with sparse and sometimes conflicting info;  I get the sense 
that most Linux users have moved away from Xen, so their anecdotes are 
aging rapidly. Hopefully someone else running Xen and NetBSD has some 
better (or at least more appropriate to my situation) guidance.  
Apologies in advance  for the Windows-heavy content of this message.  :)

I've gotten as far as successfully installing and running windows 10 on 
the domU; it runs, I can reboot it, but performance is terrible, as I 
think should be expected from a baseline install. So, I figured the next 
step was to install the Windows PV drivers available here:

https://xenproject.org/windows-pv-drivers/


Ignoring the odd choice of distributing Windows drivers as tar files, I 
managed to get all the drivers copied over to my VM and installed - and 
then the VM would no longer boot at all.  After a few hours of fiddling 
(and a complete reinstall), I figured out that support for "test signed" 
drivers needed to be enabled in Windows, so I did that.  I got a couple 
of drivers installed OK (rebooting between each install this time, to 
figure out which one is causing problems), and have run into a few of 
them which, when installed, make Windows hang forever (or at least 10 
minutes) during reboot.  Once I've gotten a boot hang, I have to go 
through the process of getting Windows into "Safe Mode" (which takes 
5-10 minutes of babysitting the VM because I have to hit keys at the 
right time, and also select from menus) and then uninstall the offending 
driver.

Thus far, these drivers seem to have installed OK (and windows performs 
somewhat better due to some of them):

xenbus

xencons

xenhid

xeniface

xennet


and these drivers cause hangs:

xenvbd

xenvif


Now, the xenvbd driver in particular seems like one that would improve 
performance if it was working properly.  Does anyone have suggestions?  
Thus far, I've only tried the "9.1" versions of drivers; perhaps trying 
the older versions might help?

Getting this working is exhausting;  I'd appreciate any insight or help 
anyone can give me.  For the record, this is info on my dom0:


Xen 4.11.4nb6

NetBSD 9.2 dom0

dom0 has 1G RAM

domU has 8G RAM, and 800G disk is allocated from LVM on top of a 
raidframe raid1


Thanks-

+j