Re: [Xen-users] Xen with VGA Passthrough on desktop Ubuntu system

[David Erickson <halcyon1981@xxxxxxxxx>]

Your best bet is to have two video cards, one for dom0 and another you
pass through to a guest.  When you boot you need to bind the second
video card to pciback (compile this statically into your kernel), then
it will be assignable to dom0.  There are lots of guides on this that
are Googleable, here are a couple wiki entries of use:

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_VGA_Passthrough

-D

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 9:32 PM, Adam Honse <calcprogrammer1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I just found out that Xen supported hardware passthrough, so I've installed
> it on my Ubuntu 12.04 home server/media center as I wanted to play some
> games in Windows.  The CPU is AMD A8-3870K and it appears that hvm itself is
> working.  I was able to boot the Windows 7 install CD with a VNC console.  I
> now want to configure the VGA passthrough.  Upon adding the hardware
> passthrough lines, I received an error along the lines of "PCI device
> xx:xx.x is not assignable".  I modprobe'd the xen-pciback module but it did
> not resolve the issue.  I am thinking that is because the device is in use
> by the system (running the 'radeon' module and the open-source radeon
> drivers).
>
> My question is this, is it possible to have the Dom-0 (native) system use
> the VGA device, and then relinquish control over the device upon starting
> the hardware-passthrough VM?  It seems like it would be possible, shutting
> down the X-server before starting the VM, but I was unable to remove the
> 'radeon' module in my tests.  It keeps saying the module is in use, though
> nothing depends on it and I disconnected all outputs.  If not, is it
> possible to have two guests, a Windows and an Ubuntu guest, that both access
> the hardware passthrough but not at the same time?  Also, how do you go
> about 'reserving' the PCI device in pcibackend so that it is available for
> the VM?
>
> Thanks,
> Adam Honse
>
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