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xen-users
Re: [Xen-users] Advice on PCIe graphics card for Xen+X86_64 for X
Mark Williamson wrote:
I used a ScienticLinux 5.0 distro (mimics RedHat 5.0 but merged the
Server and Enterprise versions) in a x86_64 arch. I ran into a problem,
because while I can have X in the normal kernel, the Xen kernel, when I
boot in dom0 is in text mode and can't load the Nvidia module. This is
because Nvidia does not support Xen. There seems to be some patches for
other distros (Suse, freeBSD) but I am afraid those might not work here
... anyway I want to avoid this.
Also I was forced to install the OS in text mode, because the graphics
card did not work out of the box with the distro. For what I want to do
now, it is not essential to have a 3D graphics card. I want to have a
dom0 for administration and to launch Linux as guests to create a
virtual cluster (but where X should perform well in the guests).
The machine's Motherboard is Intel S5000XVNSATA and I have PCIe slots
available. The question are:
1) Could someone please provide details about currently available
graphic cards (PCIe) that work under Xen, kernel 2.1.18 (SL, RedHat) and
x86_64 out of the box, so I could use X in both dom0 and domUs?
I'd have thought you could get your existing Nvidia card to work by using the
open source "nv" driver that's included with Xorg. It doesn't support the
advanced features of the Nvidia cards, but it'll do 2D for you. Maybe this
is enough? I used nv for a long time on various machines a few years ago and
found it worked just fine for me (I wasn't using Xen on those machines at the
time, though).
Yes, that would be the best solution. I also thought about that, but I
am puzzled why I got a blank screen while trying to install the OS and
was forced to install in text mode. .
I should have tried out to StartX after installing in text mode, but I
assumed it would not work.
Then went through the install on the normal kernel and thought I was
done ... to discover later the xen-kernel
was not supported.
Regarding getting good X performance out of the guests themselves... various
people have played with passing through graphics devices directly to the
guests so that they can have optimal graphics performance, but I don't know
how much success has been had there.
Using the standard virtual framebuffers / VNC that Xen supports, don't expect
to have brilliant guest graphics performance! It's server-oriented, so the
graphical interface will work OK for administration and for office-type
tasks, but don't expect fast moving graphics / video to necessarily work
well.
You could check out VMGL if you ever want to pass 3D operations from a guest
to another VM / physical machine with decent performance though:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~andreslc/xen-gl/
Thanks for the pointer, it looks interesting ... may be I will try it
out later.
2) Is there a way that I could have both graphic cards installed so I
could use the more powerful one when I boot with the normal kernel and
the new one for Xen+X, when booting under the Xen kernel?
Well, I guess you probably could. Easiest would be to hack your init scripts
around a bit so that the X server got started with a different xorg.conf
depending on what kernel you were booted into.
Actually, though, if you were going to do that you might as well just keep the
Nvidia card there and hack your init scripts so that the xorg.conf either
uses the binary "nvidia" driver or the open source "nv" driver.
Yes, that is a good idea provided "nv" works. I will try to see how to
write a xorg.conf for "nv" to test it out ...
Thanks again for your input.
Cheers,
Luis
Cheers,
Mark
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