Re: [Xen-users] Xen VGA Passthrough - GTX 480 successfully quadrified to quadro 6000 (softmod) - more than 4GB of RAM for Win XP 64 Bits

[Gordan Bobic <gordan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/17/2013 09:27 PM, David TECHER wrote:
> Gordan,
>
> I am able to have more than 3-4GB of RAM without any patch. So no patch
> required! It works both for domU = Linux 64 and domU = Win7 64.
> So I was mistaken here.
Oh, I can believe you need a patch - the only reason I can pass more 
than 2688MB of RAM to my VMs is because I patched hvmloader to make sure 
that it leaves memory holes in the same places as the host - because my 
dodgy PCIe bridges bypass the IOMMU and when the host's virtual memory 
addresses equal the physical device's BAR, everything crashes spectacularly.
But I'm glad you don't have hardware as broken as me. :)

> My domU on XP 64 was locked up (frozen) when game was starting. I had to
> change my (OR mask 1) value for soft straps so this issue went away.
> Whatever driver used it works like a charm.
Hang on - you mean to say that you managed to get VGA output on an 
external monitor with VGA passthrough WITHOUT quadrifying the card? 
Before I quadrified mine I couldn't get anything at all - VNC console 
only, and device manager was saying it couldn't start the device.
It makes me wonder if Nvidia are now tweaking the GeForce drivers to 
work better to discourage people from looking at modifying cards from 
GeForce to Quadro (since VGA passthrough is _the_ main benefit). Maybe 
they are concerned about what else we might figure out. ;)
> I set up a new VM for Win7 64 with RAM=8GB (no patch for Xen!). I was
> able to play 'Remember me' :)
>
> Here is a screenshot
>
> http://img15.hostingpics.net/pics/654044ScreenshotXenSoftmodedQuadro6000Win764.png
Good, good. Did you make sure you changed the PCI device ID in BIOS at 
around 0x18E ? This should be consistent with the PCI device ID.
> I am working on testing games on Wine with (Xen PVONHVM+NVIDIA).
>
>
> I have great esteem  for the work you did/are currently doing. Won't be
> back to Xen/NVIDIA world without you :)
I'm afraid I cannot take that much credit - to paraphrase the old quote, 
I have only succeeded at this by "standing on the shoulders of giants" 
that reverse engineered bits of this before me.
> "GTX 500 series + soldering iron" are for professional guys like you :).
Ironically, GTX580 is somewhat pointless to modify. You can soft-mod it 
to a Quadro 7000, but that isn't MultiOS, so VGA passthrough doesn't 
work (having said that - Quadro K5000 isn't MultiOS either but VGA 
passthrough works great). There is no SPEC boost from modding the 580, 
and the 580 has no bidirectional DMA engine to enable. So the only 
narrow use-case for modding it is for some professional applications (I 
seem to recall some Adobe apps were mentioned ages ago for refusing to 
even acknowledge the presence of a GeForce card for GPU processing 
offload, but worked fine with Quadros, so in that instance there may be 
 benefit (then again, I seem to recall the same could be achieved with 
an .inf mod without modifying the BIOS at all - sadly that doesn't seem 
to work for VGA passthrough).
> Got a GTX 680 at home. I will wait for your next article on your web
> site before
OK. That can be soft-modded to a Tesla K10, but requires a hard-mod for 
K5000/K2 conversion. So you'll have to get your soldering iron out for 
it, unfortunately. The process is well documented on the eevblog forum. 
What I can bring to the table is BIOS modding to get a full K5000 BIOS 
onto a 4GB GTX680 (will probably work just the same on a GTX770 since 
they are virtually identical). What I might work on next is stripping 
out all the UEFI wrappers so the real BIOS fits in under the 64KB limit 
for primary gfx passthrough. :)
> Please keep us posted about your investigations for e820_host for HVMs
You can keep track of it on the xen-devel list, but I haven't had a 
chance to do anything over and above the proof of concept patches yet.
Gordan

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