[Xen-users] Re: PCI Passthrough to VMX Guest

["David Goodlad" <dgoodlad@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 Mar 2006 15:46:27 +0000, M.A. Williamson <maw48@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Sorry, PCI passthrough to VMX guests isn't supported - the guest has to be
> paravirt and be running the PCI frontend driver.
>
> The VMX spec does include some helpful features for passing PCI devices
> through to a guest, and I'm sure it's possible to make it work - in
> principle. I don't know of anyone actually planning to hack on it though
> :-(
>
> However, there are plans to improve the display performance for VMX guests,
> so you should find the virtual framebuffer will improve in future releases.
> I understand that using rdesktop in domain0 to connect to the guest also
> works very well and provides quite snappy UI performance.

Hi Mark

That's too bad that it's not supported.  It might be a good idea to
drop a note in the driver domains/PCI passthrough section of the docs
:)

I just got rdesktop going on here yesterday after having a heck of a
time trying to get the network working.  Apparently having an ethernet
device driven by the sky2 driver attached to a bridge makes the kernel
rather unhappy right now!  I'll confirm that about rdesktop, it is, as
you say, quite snappy.

Thanks for clearing this up for me!
Dave

>
> Cheers,
> mark
>
> On Mar 21 2006, David Goodlad wrote:
>
> >Hi everyone
> >
> >I've finally got my VMX guest working great (WinXP Pro) on here.
> >However, I've got one more thing that I'd like to do.  I have a
> >secondary PCI-E video card that I want to pass through to the VM.  I
> >am using xen-unstable, so I know passthru is available...
> >
> >I have 2 graphics cards installed: an old 4MB PCI SiS 6326, and a
> >PCI-E Geforce 6200.  The PCI card is initialized first by the BIOS, so
> >it is the only one being used by Xen afaict.  I have setup my kernel
> >cmdline options to include:
> >
> >pciback.hide=(06:00.0)
> >
> >06:00.0 is the address reported by lspci for the nVidia card.  I've
> >also got a line in my vmx guest's config:
> >
> >pci = [ '06:00.0' ]
> >
> >I still see the device in lspci (I suspect that I shouldn't here!).  I
> >can't get Windows to see the device at all, either.
> >
> >Anyone have any idea what could be preventing the device from being
> >hidden?  Is pci passthru supposed to work with VMX guests (ones w/o
> >the pci frontend)?
> >
> >Thanks!
> >Dave
> >
> >--
> >Dave Goodlad
> >dgoodlad@xxxxxxxxx or dave@xxxxxxxxxx
> >http://david.goodlad.ca/
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Xen-users mailing list
> >Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
> >
>


--
Dave Goodlad
dgoodlad@xxxxxxxxx or dave@xxxxxxxxxx
http://david.goodlad.ca/

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