Andrew Lyon wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Han, Weidong<weidong.han@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Recently, more and more people are interesting in gfx passthrough.
>> But now xen-unstable doesn't support it, although some guys (Jean
>> Guyader, Beng Heng, Ng) posted gfx passthrough patches. If
>> xen-unstable includes gfx passthrough support, people can be easy to
>> try it.
>>
>> gfx passthrough is more complicated than other PCI device
>> passthrough such as NIC, and is hard to use a generic approach for
>> all gfx passthrough. But there are some necessary changes for gfx
>> passthrough:
>> 1. disable emulated VGA adapter, instead use passthroughed gfx
>> 2. load VGA bios of the gfx to guest
>> 3. passthrough legacy VGA IO ports and MMIOs to guest
>>
>> This patchset implements above common changes. Based on the common
>> changes, we are investigating to support more gfx cards and guest
>> OSs. We will post the hacks in future.
>>
>> The patchset supports to passthrough the primary gfx and discrete
>> gfx. With the patchset, virtualization friendly gfx cards can be
>> passthroughed (e.g. Nvidia FX3800), IGD and many discrete gfx cards
>> are not supported yet.
>
> What about cheaper cards in the FX range like the FX580 or FX1800, are
> they likely to be passthrough friendly?
I don't know. We didn't try those cards. You can try with our patch by yourself.
>
> Perhaps we should ask nvidia exactly which cards support
> virtualization, or is it a feature that is listed in the tech specs?,
No. we just find it works with the common changes. Actually, its VGA bios
re-execution doesn't works well.
Regards,
Weidong
> I could probably run to one of the cheaper FX cards but the high end
> ones are way too expensive for me to justify the cost.
>
> Andy
>
>>
>> This is easy to use, the only difference from other PCI passthrough
>> is to add following lines to hvm configure file:
>>
>> #----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> # 0: no gfx passthru, 1: IGD passthru, 2: discrete gfx passthru,
>> default is 0
>> gfx_passthru=2
>>
>> and also pls passthrough a USB controller for keyboard/mouse use in
>> guest. (Now there are some issues on USB controller passthrough with
>> pv-ops dom0, so currently prefer to use 2.6.18 dom0.)
>>
>>
>> The patchset is as follows:
>> 1. PATCH 1/2: changes in xen-unstable
>> - retrieves VGA bios from host VGA BIOS address (0xC0000),
>> then load it to guest VGA BIOS address (This is the same with XCI).
>> - Enlarge guest MMIO range to contain gfx card's large memory
>> - add a config option 'gfx_passthru' for gfx passthrough
>>
>> 2. PATCH 2/2: changes in QEMU
>> - disable emulated VGA adapter
>> - register/unregister legacy VGA I/O ports and MMIOs
>>
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Ben Lin <ben.y.lin@xxxxxxxxx>
>> Signed-off-by: Weidong Han <weidong.han@xxxxxxxxx>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Xen-devel mailing list
>> Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
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