Xen project Mailing List

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 8 Oct 2013 00:04:33 -0700, David Erickson <halcyon1981@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 11:29 PM, Gordan Bobic wrote:

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).

Primarily it is for htpc functionality like Blu-ray playback software
and Digital Cablecard based playback using devices like a HDHR
Prime. I believe the code that tests for playready (or equivalent)
compatibility always looks at the primary video card and finds it
totally missing any of these features and refuses to play back
properly. I need to verify that having a passed through card as the
primary actually solves these issues, but I think it is a reasonable
hunch (unless anyone else has already tried this and proved it wrong).

I never used it so cannot comment on it. David Techer maintains a
patch set for Nvidia cards that include primary passthrough support.
The one in particular you will need is the one that gives the VBIOS
loading supprot in domU. Between that and a GTX480 modified to a
Quadro 6000 (VBIOS editing required) you _might_ just be able
to get it to work. I never tried primary passthrough since secondary
passthrough has always worked for all of my requirements.

Theres actually two seperate patch sets out there that i've seen, one for ATI and one for Nvidia; the ATI patchset appears to be dynamic in nature, whereas the Nvidia set require you to dump the VBIOS and compile a copy of it into the qemu code.

Regards,

David

Re: [Xen-users] Primary VGA Passthrough Status