Re: [Xen-users] Primary VGA Passthrough Status

[Gordan Bobic <gordan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/07/2013 09:33 PM, David Erickson wrote:
> Hi All-
> Is it possible yet to pass through a ATI or Nvidia GPU as the primary
> VGA card to a Win 7/8 VM, and have it fully functional there (DXVA etc),
Why exactly do you need the card to be primary in domU? IME this doesn't 
gain you anything other than being able to see the BIOS splash screen 
and boot animation on the external monitor (which in itself isn't worth 
the extra effort).
> without crashing the guest or the host during operation or when
> resetting the guest?
It works fine with Nvidia Quadro cards (real or modified GeForce), 
provided your hardware works properly (e.g. no dodgy PCI bridges (such 
as Nvidia NF200) bypassing the IOMMU). The latter is, it turns out, 
quite rare - an awful lot of hardware seems to have IOMMU support broken 
to some extent.
ATI cards having ongoing issues with reinitialization on domU reboots.

> For hardware I have an E3 v2 Xeon, Tyan S5512 board, and an ATI 7750.
I don't recall anyone here mentioning this board so you'll have to try 
it yourself and see how you get on. ATI cards are still problematic, as 
I mentioned. For domU rebooting you might be able to get away with 
setting a delayed shutdown/reboot on the command line and then ejecting 
the card in domU. ATI drivers still don't seem to be clever enough to do 
this themselves on shutdown. Then again, I find ATI hardware 
sufficiently deficient to not recommend it for anything but the simplest 
of configurations (single monitor setups on bare metal). For anything 
else I find the drivers are just not fit for purpose.
Gordan


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