Supporting Nvidia and ATI

Supporting Nvidia and ATI

[Ghiora Drori]

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Hi,
I am interested in supporting NVDIA, ATI, Intel and presumably other
display cards when running a windows guest KVM. The idea is to get
Windows XP games to work properly under kvm when being hosted by Linux.
The screen on Linux can have more then one X windows server running on
different TTYs and it looks (I have not checked the code) like each is
running separately (aka there is a store and initialize when switching
between them) so when a kvm guest would get such a screen it would have
direct access to the display hardware.
I searched Google but did not find anything significant.
Any ideas where to start?
Thanks Ghiora

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Re: Supporting Nvidia and ATI

[Izik Eidus]

Ghiora Drori wrote:
> Hi,
> I am interested in supporting NVDIA, ATI, Intel and presumably other
> display cards when running a windows guest KVM. The idea is to get
> Windows XP games to work properly under kvm when being hosted by Linux.
> The screen on Linux can have more then one X windows server running on 
> different TTYs and it looks (I have not checked the code) like each is 
> running separately (aka there is a store and initialize when switching 
> between them) so when a kvm guest would get such a screen it would 
> have direct access to the display hardware.
> I searched Google but did not find anything significant.
> Any ideas where to start?
> Thanks Ghiora
>
you cannot do it like this, the x system use driver and use the hardware 
how it want after using the driver,
but what you can do is:
writing a windows driver for the guest that will emulate a 3d video card 
and then writing a device for qemu
that will exploit some of the host 3d graphics video card gpu for this 
emulated card,
but this really is not simple at all

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Re: Supporting Nvidia and ATI

[Caleb Moore]

On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 18:46 +0200, Ghiora Drori wrote:
> Hi,
> I am interested in supporting NVDIA, ATI, Intel and presumably other 
> display cards when running a windows guest KVM. The idea is to get 
> Windows XP games to work properly under kvm when being hosted by
> Linux. 
> The screen on Linux can have more then one X windows server running on
> different TTYs and it looks (I have not checked the code) like each is
> running separately (aka there is a store and initialize when switching
> between them) so when a kvm guest would get such a screen it would
> have direct access to the display hardware. 
> I searched Google but did not find anything significant. 
> Any ideas where to start?

For that it would probably be simplest to allow the VMM to write to the
AGP/PCIe device.

An graphics card hardware interface consists of two parts, a normal PCI
device and a GART. The PCI interface is pretty simple, it's just a table
containing useful information about memory regions, IRQs and IOports
that the device will read/write to. You'll need to make an emulated PCI
device that will map in real regions of the physical address space into
the virtual machine. The GART is a little bit more complex, it will
require a virtualised GART driver for your guest kernel that requests
memory regions from the host kernel's GART interface, puts them in the
guests address space and returns their addresses to the guest kernel.

I hope that helps.



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Re: Supporting Nvidia and ATI

[Dor Laor]

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Caleb Moore wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 18:46 +0200, Ghiora Drori wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>> I am interested in supporting NVDIA, ATI, Intel and presumably other 
>> display cards when running a windows guest KVM. The idea is to get 
>> Windows XP games to work properly under kvm when being hosted by
>> Linux. 
>> The screen on Linux can have more then one X windows server running on
>> different TTYs and it looks (I have not checked the code) like each is
>> running separately (aka there is a store and initialize when switching
>> between them) so when a kvm guest would get such a screen it would
>> have direct access to the display hardware. 
>> I searched Google but did not find anything significant. 
>> Any ideas where to start?
>>     
>
> For that it would probably be simplest to allow the VMM to write to the
> AGP/PCIe device.
>
> An graphics card hardware interface consists of two parts, a normal PCI
> device and a GART. The PCI interface is pretty simple, it's just a table
> containing useful information about memory regions, IRQs and IOports
> that the device will read/write to. You'll need to make an emulated PCI
> device that will map in real regions of the physical address space into
> the virtual machine. The GART is a little bit more complex, it will
> require a virtualised GART driver for your guest kernel that requests
> memory regions from the host kernel's GART interface, puts them in the
> guests address space and returns their addresses to the guest kernel.
>
> I hope that helps.
>
>
>   
Some of the work was released already by us and some will be released soon:
If you have 1-1 mapping between the guest addresses and the host you 
solve the gart mapping:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/10/21/125.
We also released pci passthrough and irq forwarding for qemu/kvm.
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.devel/cutoff=9470
Together you can make it work (we have a passthrough NIC working).
Dor.

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>   


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Re: Supporting Nvidia and ATI

[Ghiora Drori]

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Hi,
Looks like I will have to do some reading about what has been posted so far.
Thanks Ghiora

On Nov 12, 2007 10:27 AM, Dor Laor <dor.laor-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

>  Caleb Moore wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 18:46 +0200, Ghiora Drori wrote:
>
>
>  Hi,
> I am interested in supporting NVDIA, ATI, Intel and presumably other
> display cards when running a windows guest KVM. The idea is to get
> Windows XP games to work properly under kvm when being hosted by
> Linux.
> The screen on Linux can have more then one X windows server running on
> different TTYs and it looks (I have not checked the code) like each is
> running separately (aka there is a store and initialize when switching
> between them) so when a kvm guest would get such a screen it would
> have direct access to the display hardware.
> I searched Google but did not find anything significant.
> Any ideas where to start?
>
>
>  For that it would probably be simplest to allow the VMM to write to the
> AGP/PCIe device.
>
> An graphics card hardware interface consists of two parts, a normal PCI
> device and a GART. The PCI interface is pretty simple, it's just a table
> containing useful information about memory regions, IRQs and IOports
> that the device will read/write to. You'll need to make an emulated PCI
> device that will map in real regions of the physical address space into
> the virtual machine. The GART is a little bit more complex, it will
> require a virtualised GART driver for your guest kernel that requests
> memory regions from the host kernel's GART interface, puts them in the
> guests address space and returns their addresses to the guest kernel.
>
> I hope that helps.
>
>
>
>
>  Some of the work was released already by us and some will be released
> soon:
> If you have 1-1 mapping between the guest addresses and the host you solve
> the gart mapping:
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/10/21/125.
> We also released pci passthrough and irq forwarding for qemu/kvm.
> http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.devel/cutoff=9470
> Together you can make it work (we have a passthrough NIC working).
> Dor.
>
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> kvm-devel mailing listkvm-devel-5NWGOfrQmneRv+LV9MX5ugtCRVl27V+i0wdF1cv0I5s@public.gmane.org://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kvm-devel
>
>
>


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Re: Supporting Nvidia and ATI

[Amit Shah]

On Sunday 11 November 2007 22:16:50 Ghiora Drori wrote:
> Hi,
> I am interested in supporting NVDIA, ATI, Intel and presumably other
> display cards when running a windows guest KVM. The idea is to get
> Windows XP games to work properly under kvm when being hosted by Linux.
> The screen on Linux can have more then one X windows server running on
> different TTYs and it looks (I have not checked the code) like each is
> running separately (aka there is a store and initialize when switching
> between them) so when a kvm guest would get such a screen it would have
> direct access to the display hardware.
> I searched Google but did not find anything significant.
> Any ideas where to start?
> Thanks Ghiora

That's an interesting idea. If you have an extra video card, you 
can 'passthrough' that card to the guest, enable paravirt DMA access and 
access that video card in the guest. In case you cannot use paravirt DMA 
(eg., Windows guests), you can use 1-1 mapping of the guest OS in the host 
address space.

I sent out patches for passthrough for PCI devices and PV DMA for 64-bit hosts 
and guests last week.

For 1-1 mapping of guests in host address space, there are some patches that 
were sent out to the lkml, but there are some issues to be ironed out first, 
but it might work for you.

If you take this up seriously, I'd urge you to create a page on the wiki so 
that interested people will be able to follow the development and help with 
testing.

Amit.

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