[Xen-users] Xen as virtual KVM

["Brandon Reno" <brandonreno@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm looking at doing something that may seem a little bit odd, I would like to use xen to virtualize several desktop environments, with a specific keystroke configured to switch to that environment.
I will have either gentoo or debian as a dom0.  this will be used only for management of the virtual machines.
I will have several full desktop environments for different users.  
For example, I will be using Gentoo with KDE/Beryl (soon to be Fusion or whatever they are changing their name to)
I'd like to have a test environment for various trials of different other flavours and for development
Additionally, I will be buying a new computer, supporting AMD-V, will want to have 3 additional environments, Windows XP and Vista, for application testing, and one Windows DE for my Wife.

To accellerate as much as possible the different environments,  I would need to setup the PCI video card to passthrough to whichever domU is active.  It is not necessary for more than one environment to be active and running at any given time.
My theory is to simply configure each environment to pass through the video card, and drop one environment (suspend?), and switch to the next.  Do you see any problems with this configuration, or have any advice?

Additionally, I would need to write a program or series of scripts to manage the switching of DEs, which doesn't seem to be too much of a problem, except that it would need to capture a few specific keystrokes (i.e. win+f1 thru win+f5) to actually call the switch.
I'm not sure where I would need to start to do this should this program monitor /dev/input for the keypress, or would this need to go into the hypervisor?

I currently have a few VMs on my server computer running things like a webserver, samba share, Kerberos Authentication, etc. and have been very happy with xen.  I'd like to take the chance to document my findings on this unique setup in case someone else would be interested.

Any advice would be appreciated, or better yet, if someone has done something like this, I'd like to hear about their successes/failures.
Thanks,
Brandon Reno
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