RE: [Xen-users] 3D acceleration

["Petersson, Mats" <Mats.Petersson@xxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of brettm
> Sent: 15 May 2006 00:43
> To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Xen-users] 3D acceleration
> 
> Is it possible to use my motherboard's integrated graphics 
> for dom0 and my x1900 video card for a guest?  If so, how 
> would I set this up?

Aside from the obvious problem of having a graphics driver that actually
understands Xen, yes, I believe this could be possible. Although it
doesn't work under fully-virtualized guests (VT/SVM), since there would
be the added complication of the machine physical address and the guest
physical address (i.e. we tell the guest that it's memory is 256MB
starting at address zero, when it's really starting at 128MB), and any
direct memory access from the card would be offset by 128MB in the
example... 

But if you have  Xen-aware/Xen-compatible graphics driver, and you're
using Xen-linux rather than for example Windows or a unmodified Linux,
you should be able to give the graphics card PCI address to the guest -
I don't know the details of it, but I believe there's more than one
example of how to "hide" from Dom0 and "give" a device to DomU. 

Of course, this also assumes that your MB graphics and plug-in graphics
cards are actually able to work at the same time. I've seen more than
one design where essentially they are mutually exclusive due to sharing
the same point-to-point bus, and the one device is just disabled when
you use the other [usually a BIOS setting that says whether you want
built-in or plugged in graphics, and it's an EXCLUSE OR of those
choices.]

--
Mats
>  
>  
> On Feb 24, 2006, at 4:46 AM, Petersson, Mats wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> There's been more than one discussion thread on this subject, 
> and the summary answer is:
> - It's possible to do with a para-virtualized driver in the 
> guest - that is, a driver that takes the calls for graphics 
> commands and passes them to Dom0, where a "real" graphics 
> driver executes the actual intention of the call. 
>  
> It is not trivial to write such a driver, but it's nowhere 
> near as hard as it would be to try to get a very advanced 
> native driver to work in a guest environment.
>  
> Of course, if you have two different graphics cards in the 
> machine, Dom0 can be given one card, and one of the guest 
> domains can be given the other card, thus you can use the 
> native driver straight off (at least in fully virtualized mode). 
>  
> Can you do this one card?  Just have dom0 not have a video 
> card, and pass the only video card to domU?  That's how I run 
> all my servers anyway, and it'd be awesome to use hardware 
> acceleration on a "desktop domU"...
>  
> --
> Luke
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