[Xen-users] Making VGA passthrough work

[Paul Stimpson <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm using Xen 4.2.0 built against a stock Ubuntu 12.04 (3.2.0-29-generic kernel) with a Windows Server 2008 R2 guest. PCI passthrough works flawlessly with a regular(non-GPU) card. The machine has 2 AMD/ATI FirePro V5900 cards and I now need to attach one of them to the Windows guest as its main monitor.

I'm finding getting this working a challenge and conscious the instructions I've got from the wiki all mention Xen 4.0.0 so I don't know if they're still accurate.

Each card presents itself as 2 PCI devices: a VGA controller and a sound card that provides the audio output on the HDMI sockets. I therefore have 4 devices:

04:00.0 : VGA device
04:00.1 : Sound card
05:00.0 : VGA device
05:00.1 : Sound card

Firstly, I'm not sure how to tell which is the primary and which is secondary card as I swapped which was the primary in the BIOS to make the layout of the back panel and the cabling more logical.

So far, I've discovered:

I appear (according to the wiki) to be running the wrong PCI backend as kern.log contains a number of lines that say "xen-pciback: backend is vpci"

That there is no entry in /boot/config-3.2.0-29-generic for either "CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_BACKEND_PASS" or "CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_BACKEND_VPCI"- Do these mean I need to roll my own kernel?

I added the 04:00.0 and 04:00.1 to the options in /etc/modprobe.d/pciback.conf but they are still visible if I do an lspci on the host. Does this mean I've done something wrong?

I added the following to the guest .conf file:

gfx_passthru=1
pci=['0000:04:00.0']

(it already has a pci line in it for the other cards, so I added the non-GPU part of the card there)

pci=['0000:06:00.0','0000:04:00.1']

The Windows guest is definitely booting. There is loads of HD activity and the web services it provides are visible across xenbr0.

Both monitors start up. One displays the host's desktop 9as expected) but the other shows a black text-mode screen containing what looks like startup messages from the host. Note that I haven't installed the catalyst drivers in Windows yet (I'd assumed it would default to using the Firepro as a standard VGA and I could load the real drivers later.

What do I need to do to get the right backend in and make the passthrough work please?

Thanks,
Paul.

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