Re: [Xen-users] Direct Hardware Support using Xen and Windows Guest?

[jim burns <jim_burn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 24 February 2008 06:50:07 pm T313C0mun1s7 wrote:
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=705738

> So the holy grail here would be being able to run Windows XP Pro SP2 (or
> SP3) as a guest OS on Ubuntu, and still have direct hardware access thus
> allowing me to still have full use of my video card, DVD burner, and
> hardware dongles (tied to software licensing) without any issues.
> Performance is still an issue of course. I run a lot of software that can be 
> resource intensive such as the Adobe CS3 Master Collection and the software 
> involved there, and Video encoding software. I am also fairly active with
> VoIP and sometimes need to trascode audio codecs in real time with various
> Windows virtual PBX software (although I prefer Asterisk).      

I'm afraid you're a little ahead of the curve. Running Windows means full 
virtualization, which means performance loss. While the situation is getting 
better with hard disk/block file drivers and net drivers (see PV drivers for 
HVM from James Harper, Halsign, and proprietary approachs to PV drivers from 
various distros), the console is what really still suffers.

While direct hardware access is possible with pciback (hiding the pci device 
from the dom0 and passing it to a guest) in *theory*, in practice, read this 
list (xen-users) for awhile. People are getting it to work for some cards, 
and not others. Even if you can get a video card to pass through to your 
guest, that means you need a 2nd video card for your dom0 (or at least it 
makes setting things up a lot easier). And that's the situation for 
paravirtual (PV) guests. Support for passthrough for HVM is brand new and 
still being worked out in xen 3.2.x. Additionally (I believe) it requires 
Vt-d support to remap dma requests. Your processor may support intel vmx/Amd 
svm to get full virtuallization to work, but Vt-d is brand new. Even if you 
do have that hardware, better get your hacking shoes on!

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users