Hello Guilherme, was following your exchange and wanted to
see how this turned out.
Secondary Passthrough works with AMD, but for primary you
need to apply custom patches. There is another email chain
circling the mailing list with links to some fresh patches.
As Matthias mentioned, passthrough is working, but I am
quite certain FLR is interfering which has led to driver
related BSoD's.
My understanding is that FLR allows a virtual machine to
issue a reset to a piece of hardware, and without it that
device's state cannot be cleared. Consumer cards do not come
with FLR, and no patch for this is available.
What this means is that when you first boot your virtual
machine, the card is initialized and performs just fine. When
you shut down Windows 7 or XP and start either one back up you
may encounter a BSoD. This is because the card is being
initialized a second time.
For me and many others rebooting has led to degraded
performance instead of a BSoD, which can be fixed by manually
ejecting the card with the "safely eject media" tool. However
experiences vary.
I am using an AMD Radeon HD 6870 with 12.10 catalyst
drivers, and it is working just fine. I have had this working
in both Windows 7 and Windows 8, but I have no experience with
XP.
Keeping in mind that your experience may vary, here is my
route to success:
First, backup your Windows HVM before attempting to pass
any PCI devices.
Make certain that Dom0 has been freshly booted to ensure
that the PCI card only initializes once. The leading cause to
trouble from my experience is passing the card more than once
at any point during the installation, which leads to a BSoD
during the process OR a badly damaged install which can range
from BSoD on reboot only to gradual buggy experiences and
BSoD's on first boot.
Prior to passing the PCI card to Windows 7 or
Windows 8 be sure to turn off all automatic driver
installation settings (there are more than one). If using
Windows 8 do not add the card to the configuration, instead
let it boot and then use `xl pci-attach`, since Windows 8 will
attempt to install a driver at boot time and reboot without
ever displaying anything on screen.
Once the installation has completed it may ask you to
reboot, instead shut down Windows and reboot Dom0 then start
Windows again. This avoids any post-install processes from
attempting to communicate with the card in its buggy
(previously initialized) state, which could muck up the
installation.
I have used the above rules successfully more than a dozen
times now, and never once had a BSoD when I followed them.
Finally, the reason for the backup at the beginning is that
anytime I failed to follow the above rules, I was not able to
fix the problem by removing and installing the drivers again.
In fact, that never once worked and I wasted a few days
trying several times without success. So in short, if you
fail don't bother removing the drivers and trying again,
instead restore from an image backup of the machine that has
never once seen your PCI device.
I hope this information helps.
Sincerely,
Casey DeLorme
