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Same as Atom2,
IBM ServeRaid M1015 reflashed to an LSI9211-8i passed-through

dom0 alpine-linux (not sure about the version right now)

domU debian 7.5

proc and CPU support VT-d (core i5 4570T and asrock mini-ITX but dont know the model on the top of my head)

dont know about having 2 "LSI" cards or RAID cards though

I do see some slowdowns with 100% busy disks but i dont know exactly where the problem lies and have not looked hard into it really...

Pierre

On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 9:00 PM, Atom2 <ariel.atom2@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am 29.08.14 00:53, schrieb Mike Reardon:

Hello,

I am curious if I add a PCIe RAID card to my system, if Xen will allow
me to pass it through to a domU so that the guest can have native disk
operations.

The domU in question is a Windows HVM guest that I am using as a PVR.Â I
tried using the GplPv drivers in windows but kept getting XenVbd errors
and resets in the event logs causing video playback pauses, so I'm
currently serving the video storage volume to the guest via iSCSI, which
isn't exactly ideal.Â I'm hoping that I can just add in the RAID card
and a couple disks and have native I/O, but I don't know if that is
going to work.Â I'm mainly concerned that the card won't be properly
initialized when the guest starts, or that there will be some sort of
conflict with the LSI RAID card that the server is already using.

Does anyone have any experience in using a RAID card in this way?Â Any
insights that anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated as I
haven't yet decided whether I will buy the card or not.

I am using an IBM ServeRaid M1015 (reflashed to an LSI9211-8i, so no longer a real RAID card) on XEN 4.3.2. My dom0 OS is gentoo linux (kernel 3.15.8-hardened) and the guest domU is FreeBSD 10.0 (x64, therefore HVM mode with PV drivers for a block- and net devices). The reason for the passthrough is that I use ZFS on FreeBSD (raidz2 with 4 2TB disks). ZFS prefers to have direct access to the drives. This approach also ensures that SMART monitoring for the disks works in the domU.

Both my motherboard and my processor (XEON E3-1260L) support VT-d.

The only requirement in FreeBSD was to disable MSI-X for the IBM ServerRaid card and stick to MSI interrupts. I don't know whether that's performance relevant, but I am sure somebody else is able to comment on that aspect.

So far I have not seen any other issues, but still need to do some stress testing one day.

Regards Atom2

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Re: [Xen-users] Passthrough of PCIe RAID card