Re: [Xen-users] VGA Passthrough (NVIDIA) - current status?

[Gizmo Chicken <gizmochicken@xxxxxxxxx>]

Paul,

Apart from their high end workstation cards, such as the Quadro 2000, Nvidia cards aren't known to be Xen friendly.  On the other hand, even mid-range AMD Radeon cards have been reported to support VGA-passthrough.  (See http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XenVGAPassthroughTestedAdapters)  So to save yourself many headaches, I recommend that you invest in a mid-range (or better) AMD Radeon card.  In my case, I found that a GigaByte AMD Radeon HD 6670 (about $60 on sale) supported VGA-passthrough with an HVM domU.



For a well-written and very detailed tutorial describing something similar to what are describing, have a look here:  http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=112013



Best regards,
GizmoChicken

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Casey DeLorme <cdelorme@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have had great success with an AMD consumer card.  Some minor issues with FLR that aren't well explained, but I put together a comprehensive tutorial on Debian (similar to Ubuntu I'm sure) with a video walkthrough as well:

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Xen_Debian_Wheezy_PCI_Passthrough_Tutorial

To my understanding nVidia takes a bit of extra effort, generally involving some Xen source patching, but I do not know whether that is required for their server grade cards (which I believe are built to support IOMMU).  For patching details check out David Techer's Blog:

http://www.davidgis.fr/blog/index.php?Xen

Maybe someone else can supply their experience with nVidia Server cards?

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Paul Mayer <equilibrium87@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this gets asked over and over again, but I just joined the list and wanted to ask what the current status of the VGA-passthrough possibilities is.
Today I set up my new workstation that has a Kepler card in it and compiled XEN 4.2.1 on Ubuntu 12.04. The first problem I ran into was that the system
just hung up after the login screen, which (after quite some google-research) seems to be a common problem caused by proprietary nvidia drivers used
(I am using the experimental 310 binaries, which are required by CUDA 5.x).

What I want to achieve is the following: Being able to spawn several VMs such that I am not required to mess around with my base OS if I am working on
university assignments. Therefore, it can be assumed, that only one VM will the GPU at a time. At the same time, close to native performance would be
nice.

I have read list entries from aprox. 2 years ago covering the topic (applying patches, extracting the card's BIOS,...) - but is there something more recent
that someone could point me to? Is there anyone who successfully runs a Kepler card + CUDA in his/her VM?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Happy new year & Regards,
Paul Mayer

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