[Xen-devel] Re: Fw Subject: xen + accelerated graphics

[Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alexander Kellett wrote:

> btw, just fyi the xendemo iso image seems to have corrupt 
> src dir. not certain of this though, could be a local problem

Hmm, we've had success reports from others, so I suspect the
problem may be at your end.

Have you checked the md5sum?

> i'm guessing that the Xen VMM has its own little drivers for
> each thing on the system, and i assume they are forwarded
> after being resource divided somehow, or do the ports of
> the os's also require new drivers that use simplified xen
> "hardware"? 

For disk and network the hardware device drivers are in Xen and a
idealised virtual interface is exported to the guest OSes which
then use simple custom device drivers.

> given the note about 'agpgart' in the README.CD
> i'm guessing that you somehow divide the hardware up between
> users in fact.

We do graphics a bit differently: a domain (guest OS) may be
granted access to a set of hardware resources, allowing it to
control them directly. This seemed the most sensible thing to do
for the display, since it enables an unmodified Xserver to run,
and it can do its own virtualisation for other guest OSes.

The problem with agpgart is that we don't currently virtualise
and export enough of the PCI interface to the privileged guest OS
to enable it work. We'll fix this at some point.

> as i'm unable to get at the source tree (the burnt cdrom doesn't 
> work and network connection is minimal here) i can't confirm
> my assumptions. but, i wondered, is it possible for xen to 
> provide multiple virtualized and yet still accelerated graphics
> cards to the underlying os?

To do that, we'd need to put some part of the accelerated
graphics drivers into Xen, which we haven't really thought about;
servers are our main application area.

> thanks in advance, and sorry for the stupid sounding questions :)

No problem.


If you've got limited bandwidth, how about pulling the BK
repository?

Best,
Ian



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