RE: [Xen-devel] good progress on pci vga passthrough in xen-3.4-rc1

[Tim Moore <timothy.moore@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bryan

 

I think my email to Peter along with emails from probably yourself and other people in the community is what prompted his reply to xen-users.

 

There seems to be a general reluctance to move this forwards within the Xen developers, I think this may be due to the current status of some of the commercial vendors that are working on the “next big thing” for Virtualisation. Neocleus and XCI seem to be the products that will bring this to market.. it seems that the open source community may be being left out at this stage!?

 

Tim

 

---

From: Bryan York [mailto:bryan.york@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 15 April 2009 04:37
To: Tim Moore
Cc: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] good progress on pci vga passthrough in xen-3.4-rc1

 

Working on something similar. Have you contacted Peter J. van der Maas regarding this? He has the Q35 intel board, but was able to fully pass through an nvidia card to a Windows HVM DomU. You can see his latest message on Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 5:54 PM in the xen-users list. He may have some more technical details regarding this, but he seems hesitant to provide more details to these lists.

-Bryan

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Tim Moore <timothy.moore@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Platform : Nehalem, official Intel x58 with Core i7 920 (dx58so)

Main (Console): Nvidia 9500 GT PCI Express

Secondary: Nvidia 8800 GTS PCI Express

 

Yes, I binned the ASUS P6T due to bad VT-d support in the BIOS.

 

With the latest BIOS from Intel, the dx58so has enable/disable for VT-d, ICH FLR and Interrupt Mapping! Helped a lot with getting this working ...

 

Dom0: 2.6.18-xen0 (built from xen-3.4-rc1)

DomU: 2.6.26-1-xen-amd64 (deb lenny shipped)

 

SUCCESS! - Linux DomU with the official drivers from Nvidia (180.44) .. boot DomU into console, patch and install Nvidia driver, then started X using defaults. gdm chooser appeared on Secondary screen!!

 

So far, i`m using VNC or Synergy to control the DomU (from Dom0 also running X/gdm) and it is good and stable.

 

ISSUES:

This is only possible after a clean restart of the physical machine. Dom0 kernel seems to have problems with the IRQ. BUG trap: "irq has gone away" after attempting to start DomU a second time, Dom0 kernel displays: Disabling IRQ#. (the IRQ IS being shared on Dom0 with a usb controller, but im assuming this is already patched from reading xen history)

 

Also confirmed that this is NOT possible under a HVM or running Windows in a DomU, this could be due to the IRQ corruption but i`m not really sure, in both cases the PCI device is visible but the driver will not load :(

 

As these vga cards dont support FLR, would the FLR code when attempting d3r or sbr cause the interrupt corruption ?

 

Some steer and some assistance would help here, i`m trying to get this working for HVM too !?

 

BTW: I`m eagerly awaiting Jeremy Fitzhardinge to bring pciback.ko to the modern kernels ! Support for this chipset in 2.6.18 is not very good and i would like to try pvops and PCI passthrough. (although, got a hang with x2apic and IRQ mapping enabled)

 

I`m willing to help move the development of xen forwards with any testing or assistance you guys need!

 

Thanks,

Tim

http://www.linkedin.com/in/tmoore

 

 

 

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