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RE: [Xen-users] 3D acceleration

To: "Luke" <secureboot@xxxxxxxxx>, xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [Xen-users] 3D acceleration
From: "Petersson, Mats" <Mats.Petersson@xxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:01:39 +0100
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From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Luke
Sent: 24 February 2006 14:34
To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] 3D acceleration


On Feb 24, 2006, at 4:46 AM, Petersson, Mats wrote:

There's been more than one discussion thread on this subject, and the summary answer is:
- It's possible to do with a para-virtualized driver in the guest - that is, a driver that takes the calls for graphics commands and passes them to Dom0, where a "real" graphics driver executes the actual intention of the call.
 
It is not trivial to write such a driver, but it's nowhere near as hard as it would be to try to get a very advanced native driver to work in a guest environment.
 
Of course, if you have two different graphics cards in the machine, Dom0 can be given one card, and one of the guest domains can be given the other card, thus you can use the native driver straight off (at least in fully virtualized mode).

Can you do this one card?  Just have dom0 not have a video card, and pass the only video card to domU?  That's how I run all my servers anyway, and it'd be awesome to use hardware acceleration on a "desktop domU"... 
I guess in theory, you could. You do have to make sure that Dom0 doesn't recognise and/or grab the video card at any time, which is probably not very difficult - but I don't know for sure.
 
Of course, you then also need to have a serial console or something along those lines to be able to get to the console and do admin stuff once in a while - hopefully not very often... ;-)
 
--
Mats

-- 
Luke
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