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Re: [Xen-users] PCI Passthrough to VMX Guest

Sorry, PCI passthrough to VMX guests isn't supported - the guest has to be paravirt and be running the PCI frontend driver.

The VMX spec does include some helpful features for passing PCI devices through to a guest, and I'm sure it's possible to make it work - in principle. I don't know of anyone actually planning to hack on it though :-(

However, there are plans to improve the display performance for VMX guests, so you should find the virtual framebuffer will improve in future releases. I understand that using rdesktop in domain0 to connect to the guest also works very well and provides quite snappy UI performance.

Cheers,
mark

On Mar 21 2006, David Goodlad wrote:

Hi everyone

I've finally got my VMX guest working great (WinXP Pro) on here. However, I've got one more thing that I'd like to do. I have a
secondary PCI-E video card that I want to pass through to the VM.  I
am using xen-unstable, so I know passthru is available...

I have 2 graphics cards installed: an old 4MB PCI SiS 6326, and a
PCI-E Geforce 6200.  The PCI card is initialized first by the BIOS, so
it is the only one being used by Xen afaict.  I have setup my kernel
cmdline options to include:

pciback.hide=(06:00.0)

06:00.0 is the address reported by lspci for the nVidia card.  I've
also got a line in my vmx guest's config:

pci = [ '06:00.0' ]

I still see the device in lspci (I suspect that I shouldn't here!).  I
can't get Windows to see the device at all, either.

Anyone have any idea what could be preventing the device from being
hidden?  Is pci passthru supposed to work with VMX guests (ones w/o
the pci frontend)?

Thanks!
Dave

--
Dave Goodlad
dgoodlad@xxxxxxxxx or dave@xxxxxxxxxx
http://david.goodlad.ca/

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