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
