Re: [Xen-users] RHEL HVM

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

You're looking at PCI passthrough, right, Phil?  I'm not sure what the 
original e-mail was about (Tony ... ?).

Anyhow, on to your question:

> I have been looking at doing a similar thing (just ethernet, multiple cards
> though) with a RedHat HVM.  As far as I have read though, it is not
> possible to do this with an HVM, only a PV system.  Can anyone confirm
> this, because it's been very hard to find any actual information regarding
> this.  It's mostly one off comments and suggestions so far.

You can't do PCI passthrough to HVM guests without IOMMU hardware (and a 
sufficiently new version of Xen).  There are some (very recent) systems that 
do have the hardware support required - e.g. Intel's VT-d.  There's been some 
development work on passing through PCI devices to HVM guests without IOMMU 
support but it's not in the mainline Xen tree yet.

You can configure HVM guests to pass through USB devices to guests, even if 
the dom0 doesn't have a driver for that device.  I've heard varying reports 
of the performance / stability of this but it might be worth a try!

You can boost performance of HVM guests by installing paravirt drivers for 
block and network.  There's even a GPL licensed set of PV drivers for Windows 
being developed by James Harper and Andy Grover.

Hope that helps,
Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)

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