On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 02:29:51PM +0200, Sandi Romih wrote:
> Hello,
> I am looking into building a workstation using Xen to host several
> operating systems.
> Looking at the pci passthrough requirements of Xen4.1 on the [1]VTdHowTo
> page, I am a little puzzled with the fact that only Intel Core2Duo (with
> VT-x), Core2Quad, i7 and Core i5 (vPro Brand) CPU's are supported while
> motherboards with the i55x0 chipset are supported (for example
> the Supermicro server mainboard: [2]X8DT3-F).
> The irony in all this it that above this list of supported CPU's and
> motherboards is the statement "Note that in addition to the motherboard
> chipset and BIOS also your CPU must have support for IOMMU IO
> virtualization (VT-d)!".
> It is ironic because the i55x0 chipset only supports Intel 5500 and 5600
> Xeon CPU's, which according to Intel, do NOT have VT-d support integrated.
> To my knowledge, Core i7 CPU's can not be used (in a dual configuration)
> with i55x0 chipsets. In fact, if one looks at the specs of these 55x0
> motherboards, one will only find support for 5500 and 5600 CPU's.
> Is it possible that the i55x0 series of chipsets is listed here because it
> was used with a single i7 CPU?
> I currently have the EVGA SR-2 motherboard (which is a dual Xeon 5500/5600
> board with the i5520 chipset) on which I would like to build this multi OS
> workstation.
> So I would be very grateful if someone could confirm whether Xeon 5600
> CPU's and 5520 chipsets will work with pci passthrough in Xen4.1.
> Regards
>
afaik VT-d IOMMU is more of a chipset feature than CPU feature..
also VTdHowTo might be out-of-date. Feel free to update.
Anyway, I have some servers with VT-d IOMMU available with Xeon 5600 series CPUs.
-- Pasi
