Re: [Xen-users] VGA passthrough with Xen 4.3 and xl toolstack - performance degradation resolved?

[Gordan Bobic <gordan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Reboot issues are an ATI-only problem. Nvidia cards don't suffer from it because the driver in domU does a much better job than ATI's.

This is the main reason why there has recently been a lot of noise about modifying GeForce cards into Quadros for virtualized gaming. I run a pair of modified 780Ti cards (faux Quadro K6000). Up to and including GTX480 you can soft mod it by editing half a byte in the BIOS straps.

There were patches posted a while back that implement re-initializing passed through devices via a PCI bus reset but I don't know what release those will land in off the top of my head.


"H. Sieger" <powerhouse.linux@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello,

Hope you can help. A while ago users noted performance degradation or dom0 stability issues when shuting down a HVM guest that uses VGA passthrough (e.g. Windows 7), and booting up the guest again. A workaround was to eject the graphics card within Windows, before shutting down the guest. This process is described here: http://blog.ktz.me/?p=219.

I tried to follow those instructions, but my Windows 7 guest wouldn't boot again after installing the startup and shutdown scripts. Manual eject/insert of the graphics card running the "logon" script worked fine, however (i.e. not a problem with incorrect PCI device ID).

Following this failure and after removing the startup/shutdown scripts, I booted and shutdown the Windows guest repeatedly, each time running a Unigine benchmark to test graphics performance. Surprise: everything works just fine.

Now the question: I'm using a Nvidia Quadro 2000 card and I was wondering if this guest reboot issue was only related to AMD graphics cards?

Or has this bug been fixed in Xen 4.3? I like to know.

Thanks in advance.

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