Re: [Xen-users] Xen on AMD64 with Desktop on domU

[Samir Mishra <sqmishra@xxxxxx>]

In one of the documents, I read, it indicated that, for example, if I 
had 2 PCI network cards, and I wanted to have domU manage one of the 
cards directly, there's a way of telling Dom0 to not manage the card in 
question. Is it possible to do something similar with the AGP adapter 
bus/card? But, given I actually get this to work, how do I go about 
getting desktop domU to gain control of tty7 (or whatever, since all 
consoles are (I believe) controlled by dom0. In other words, I'd like to 
have a direct pass-through.
Could I achieve something similar by installing Xorg in dom0 and domU 
and running XDMCP to connect to domU? This would mean a more complicated 
package management scenario. I guess it all depends on how well the 
nvidia drivers play with Xen.
Any thoughts?

SM

Petersson, Mats wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> > [mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of 
> > Samir Mishra
> > Sent: 20 April 2006 12:00
> > To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Subject: [Xen-users] Xen on AMD64 with Desktop on domU
> >
> > Hello.
> >
> > I'm doing a fresh install of Xen on an AMD64 using Gentoo. I 
> > have an nvidia graphics card. Dom0 will be a minimal system 
> > install without Xorg or any other GUI applications. I'm 
> > hoping to set up Xen with 3 guest domains -- one running 
> > servers for the network (ntp, dhcp, bind, yp, etc.), one 
> > guest domain running my desktop with Xorg and the third guest 
> > domain to be used for development & testing.
> > What I'm hoping to find out is --
> > 1. does the above make sense?
> >     
> In theory yes. In practice, it doesn't work. See below. 
>
>   
> > 2. I want to access the X-server on the desktop domU directly 
> > on tty7. 
> > Is this possible? If so, how can I do this?
> >     
> No. The X-server needs to be the OWNER of all the graphics card, and
> your Dom0 takes ownership of the graphics card very early on. 
>
> There is two solutions that come to mind:
> You could perhaps use a simple PCI graphics card for the Dom0 console,
> and then give the DomU the nvidia card, but any shared hardware must be
> managed by one Domain only (and everyone else talking through that
> domain to get access). Of coruse, this assumes that there is an nVidia
> driver that works under Xen, which I don't think exists (yet) - and I
> very much doubt that native kernel graphics drivers will work "out of
> the box" - as they probably do all sorts of "nasty" things that Xen
> needs to be aware of.
>
> Or you can use vncserver/vncviewer to access your desktop machine.
>
>   
> > 3. what are the things I need to watch out for?
> >     
> See above. 
>
> [Snip other questions that I can't really answer anyways]
>
> --
> Mats
>
>
>   

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