Re: good progress on pci vga passthrough in xen-3.4-rc1

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@eu.citrix.com>]

Tim Moore wrote:

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> [XCI] Question?
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> 
> Hi J/Ross, Hope you can help …
> 
>  
> 
> Reading the Xen Client Initiative meeting minutes from May 20 2008, it
> mentions that:
> 
>  
> 
>     * Multiple graphics cards are working with recent patches (3 Main
>       vendors) 
> 
>  
> 
> Do we know which 3x Graphics card vendors are working?
> 
>  
> 
> I have built the XCI source from xenbits and whilst using it seems that
> the VGA card  support is still quite specific …
> 


The VGA support in XCI at the moment is Intel specific.

However videocard passthrough should work OK with most graphic cards if
you passthrought the videocard to the guest as a secondary card (you do
not disable the emulated cirrus vga). The problem with this approach is
that you are not able to see anything on the screen until the guest
enables the secondary card so you may need to configure the guest using
vnc fron another machine, at least the first time.
On the other hand if you disable the emulated vga so the pt graphic card
happers as a primary in the guest, you should be able to see output on
the screen since the beginning of the guest boot sequence, but then you
are going to have more vga bios problems.