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Re: [Xen-users] VGA/PCI Passthrough of Secondary Graphics Adapter



I too got the atikmpag.sys BSOD initially, I got around it by installing the 12.104 drivers. It also took me a while to realize I had a "working" solution:

I would install the drivers, then reboot the dom0, start the domU, connect vnc, and then windows would hang on "Starting Windows". Turns out windows completes the login (I set up auto-login) on the output of the card I passed through. In device manager the emulated VGA adapter shows an error, while the ATI card is fine. If I reboot domU, the emulated VGA is fine, while the ATI card shows an error. For a while I thought I had to do a dom0 reboot, which fixes it, but ejecting the card also works (although I will have to find a way to shut down the domU "in the dark" which is cleaner than xl destroy).

My passthrough card is an Asus HD7970. I initially had an Asus HD7770 as my dom0 card, but that caused problems. I have the 7970 in the first PCIe slot and the dom0 in the second, but I can set in bios which prints POST. I could not get an ATI driver to work in dom0. I tried the open source Radeon driver, which needed mesa 9.1+ for acceleration with Southern Islands/HD7xxx, which again needed a patched llvm I had to pull from the git-repo of what I actually believe is an AMD engineer. Still, glxgears gave me 5-7 fps. It might have worked nicely without acceleration but I needed that for monitor rotation. Note that you only need mesa 9.1+ for SI/HD7xxx. The AMD's official driver gave me an amputated xorg.log and ugly segfaults. I pulled out the card and installed my old nVidia GTX275, which now works like a charm with the binary driver. I will order something like an nVidia GTX650 because my 275 only supports 2 monitors and I need 3. I got the HD7770 as a dom0 card because I thought it would simplify matters, turns out the opposite was true. But I do not know if this is related to xen, could be a lot of things.

I hope this information will be useful to someone beyond myself, because I had to spend quite a bit of time to get it to work. Time is money too, so there comes a point where buying working solutions becomes cheap. I would like to see a database of working hardware combinations. (Atleast I would have loved to when I was setting it up)

Setup:
Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5 with i7-3820
Gentoo dom0 at 3.7.10, 3.8.10, will now test 3.9.0
Xen 4.2.0 from portage, xl toolstack
nVidia GTX275 as dom0 VGA
Asus Radeon HD7770 DCU-II as domU Secondary Passthrough
Windows 7 64bit with PV drivers.
AMD 12.104 drivers
xen kernel options:
  dom0_mem=8192M,max:8192M
  dom0_max_vpcus=4
  dom0_vcpus_pin
  iommu=1
  xsave=1
linux kernel options:
  xen-pciback.permissive
  xen-pciback.hide=(USBbus and VGA card)

I anyone have a good solution for cleanly shutting down windows without a monitor, or would like to see more configuration, please give me a shout.

- OJ 


On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 2:39 PM, Gordan Bobic <gordan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:54:05 -0400, Casey DeLorme <cdelorme@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have been using version 0.11.0.357 for three months on Windows 8
with passthrough.

It makes a significant difference in disk (SSD) performance, but I am
not sure about network.

As Gordan said, not exactly the best choice for stability yet.

My VM disk is an iSCSI share, so I'm not too concerned about making
latency any less bad at the moment. Just having things work would
be nice for now. :)


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