[Xen-users] A few technical questions

[Sean Pryor <seriuomnis@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all, I've been tinkering with Xen for a while, and a few technical questions came up that I have yet to find succinct answers for. If someone has the time to answer these, it will certainly speed along my deployment :D

> Who owns the threads(proper term?) representing to the VCPUs? Is there some way in which I can access those threads or control how they are launched? I guess in general the process of loading a VM is a little fuzzy to me. (do VMs go through the Dom0 kernel to do memory access or is that handled completely by the hypervisor? Are the threads visible to Dom0?) In general I'm wondering if there's a way to launch a VM such that all its VCPUs are under a thread migration framework

> Virtual disk chaining, is it possible to make modifications to the disk and have the changes be made to that image rather than chained on? (failing that, is it possible to go back and consolidate identical blocks?) If I've understood it correctly, it's copy-on-write, and any extra copies pull from the main image but write their changes to their own copy. This seems like a very basic question, but I was unable to find explicitly whether or not it's possible to make updates to only the original copy. It seems like this should work, but since I'm here, couldn't hurt to throw that one in as well

> Graphics passthrough. I've read conflicting stories on this. Is it possible to pass a host's primary graphics adapter through to a guest, and have that guest output all graphics through it? In that case, it seems it would require some functionality to switch the graphics adapter back. Would this be handled by that VGPU mapping feature in XAPI? The motherboard I was testing with lacked an IOMMU, so I was unable to test it properly. If someone has a clear answer on this, it would be awesome

Thanks for your time,

Sean Pryor

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-users