[Xen-users] VGA passthrough Catalyst 13.1 crash/BSOD and workaround

[Eriks Latosheks <forester@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was able to successfully pass AMD HD7950 to Win8 x64 domU as secondary adapter using Xen 4.2.1 (dom0 is Gentoo x64). Passing as primary one does not work, probably because my system uses UEFI boot, or this is simply not supported by Xen.

However when trying to install Catalyst 13.1 (latest stable driver from AMD), domU hangs on the screen where Catalyst installer performs "detecting video adapter". CPU usage drops to 0 and basically nothing happens (mouse pointer stops updating too).

As I found out there is a trick how to avoid this crash:

1) boot windows domU without attaching GPU

2) attach video card using xl pci-attach when domU is fully initialized (i.e. user logged to desktop)

3) run Catalyst installation. Catalyst will detect video card and install latest driver without crashing the system.

4) reboot domU with attached GPU

Win8 domU works rock-stable for me so far and performance is near live installation (well except hdd, unfortunately GPLPV driver do not work for me but this is another story).

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-users