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Re: [Xen-users] Best kernel choice for a stable VGA passthrough under Debian 7.4 wheezy


  • To: "xen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • From: "H. Sieger" <powerhouse.linux@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 08:50:34 -0700 (PDT)
  • Delivery-date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:51:51 +0000
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  • List-id: Xen user discussion <xen-users.lists.xen.org>

Not sure what you try to accomplish, but here is my go:

a. I've never tried Xen with suspend mode or similar, but that seems counterintuitive. Xen would not know what the guests are doing, particularly HVM guests. Suspending Xen would also suspend the guest - at the very best - which may not be a good idea. Other than that I cannot give an answer on whether or not Xen supports suspend/hibernate modes. Hope someone jumps in.
What I do know is that Xen can use ACPI to throttle the CPU - on my Xen PC it works nicely (running Linux Mint 16 / Ubuntu 13.10 with kernel 3.11 and Xen 4.3 using xm toolstack).

b. To use PCI passthrough your notebook and processor must support VT-d (for Intel CPUs). To check for VT-d support, restart your notebook and boot into the regular (non-Xen) kernel. In a terminal window run:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep svm

If svm is there then your PC/CPU/BIOS supports VT-d and it's enabled. If not, reboot and go into the BIOS, search for an option to enable VT-d or IOMMU or whatever its called on your machine.

According to ark.intel.com the i5 3220 does NOT support VT-d. However, the i5 3320M does support VT-d. So I hope you made a mistake, since the Lenovo X230 data sheet lists the i5 3320M, the i5 3360M, and the i7 3520M as available CPUs, all of which support VT-d.

Now if you are lucky, the BIOS may even support PCI passthrough.

Above I mentioned my Linux distro and Xen version which I use for PCI and VGA passthrough. I gather that you want to pass through the IGP to your Windows guest?
If you have only one GPU (your IGP) it will be a bit of a challenge, since you need to hide the IGP from Linux at boot and run Linux headless. You would need to install and configure an ssh server on the notebook, a vnc server, and use another computer to connect to your notebook while installing a Windows VM with primary passthrough of the IGP. I haven't tried that yet, but it has been done.

I wrote a how-to for secondary graphics passthrough here: HOW-TO make dual-boot obsolete using XEN VGA passthrough. In the guest config file you may try gfx_passthru=1
for graphics card passthrough as primary card (without the qemu-dm virtual GPU). If that doesn't work, try secondary passthrough as described.

With only one graphics card/IGP you would access your Linux dom0 for example via remote desktop from within Windows.

Good luck!


On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 5:51 PM, "xen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,

I am using Xen on the standard Debian stable 7.4 Wheezy, i.e. kernel 
3.2 and xen 4.1, on my company laptop. This is a Lenovo X230 with 
Intel i5 3220 Ivy Bridge and its IGP; Intel 520 SSD and 8 GB of RAM. 
My system is not able to have:

a) Power Management: when I run Debian over xen as Dom0, the power 
mnagement does not work anymore: sleep block my computer and there is 
not way to wake up, so I have to restart the whole.
b) PCI Passthrough: I have installed a Windows7 HVM under Xen which 
works fine, but wuth the default VGA supporting only DX6, it is not 
even possible to install Visual Studio on it (requires DX9 since 2010).
This would be only the IGP of Intel i5 Ivy (3220). Xen seems to be the 
only hypervirtualizer supporting  it.

What is the recommanded stable kernel combination to be able to have both?
I would prefer a "out of the box" solution with support than a own 
compiled solution. I just want something that works.

I've read that Power management requires kernel over 3.4 and PCI 
passthrough requires pciback. I suppose I would also need usbback for 
USB3 and scsiback to get full support for my SSD (trim?)

Does the Jessie backports (kernel 3.12) support these features?
Or do I really have to compile all the stuff?

Thanks for your advices!

Eric


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