Re: GFX Passthrough

[listmail <listmail@triad.rr.com>]

When secondary vga pt is used, is FLR still required?  Do you have vga 
output as soon as the qemu bios comes up?  Or is it what some people 
report where output doesn't show up until later on in the kernel/windows 
boot process?   I have been hoping that maybe some experimental patches 
for FLR support crop up to test vga pt again on my 8800gts.

Tobias Geiger wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> many People seem to be interested in the Graphic-Card Passthrough Feature (for 
> more or less obvious reasons).
>
> Official Support is still under development, and i hope not to interfere with it 
> in any (bad) way ...
>
> But i remember my own painfull and timeconsuming research when i wanted this 
> feature to work, so i thought perhaps this spares some time for the unpatient 
> users like me :)
>
> So here is what i did to enable Passthrough of my Secondary PCIE Graphic-Card 
> which is a NVIDIA GT200;
>
> Key thing seems to be the Patches 1 to 4
> (Patch #5 is only so that i have alsa-backed sound emulation , for some reason 
> i have only oss-backed if not applied ?!)
>
> Before all that, you need to read out the VGA Bios of the to-be-passthroughed-
> Graphiccard with a tool; i used nvflash.exe under DOS for this task.
> The patches assume you saved this file as "vgabios-pt.bin"
>
> 1. check out xen unstable:
>     hg clone http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg
> 2. go into there and do an "initial build" so that qemu-dm gets checked-out:
>     cd  xen-unstable.hg; cd tools; make ; make clean
> 3. apply the patches from within the "xen-unstable.hg" dir, with patch -p0
> 4. move the vgabios-pt.bin to "tools/firmware/vgabios/"
> 4. do a "make install"
>
> Thats it. 
>
> Warning: a "make clean" deletes the "vgabios-pt.bin" file , so remember to put 
> it there again before your next "make" ...
>
> After that, and assuming your hardware/bios is VT-D ready and your XEN-PCI 
> Config is correct (kernel-cmdline, xen-configfile), the HVM guest should be able 
> to work with the passedthrough-Graphicscard.
>
> Greetings, Good luck, and THANK YOU XEN-GUYS!
> Tobias
>
> P.S.: NONE of the patches are my origin. they were gathered from here (xen-
> devel) and endless google-researches, representing the hard brainwork of much 
> smarter guys than me ;)
>   
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