one video card - can I PCI-pass-through to DomU?

one video card - can I PCI-pass-through to DomU?

[Alexander Ivanov]

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Hello guys,
first want to say that I've been a happy user of Xen for about 6 months
already - replaced bunch of old servers with just 2 machines reducing power
consumption and increasing reliability at the same time (not speaking about
systems maintenance!).

But now I got a problem. In short - is it possible to "PCI pass-though" to
HVM guest the only graphical card on a physical server?

I've been running several servers with Xen (3.4.2/3.4.3) with a bunch of VMs
(both PV and HVM, Win/Linux) and it works great. Now I have one Windows
application that seems can't be virtualized due to some graphics activity
(basically lot of grids needs to be displayed and updated - and it all in
Visual Basic) - neither standard VGA or cirrus logic modes can render it so
it would perform good enough. So the idea is to give my physical server's
card to this particular VM.

I guess if I would have 2 video cards in the server passing through the
second card to HVM (windows 2003x32 server) would be not a problem, would
it? But if I only have 1 card - is it possible at all?

Thank you,
Alex

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Re: one video card - can I PCI-pass-through to DomU?

[Weidong Han]

Alexander Ivanov wrote:
> Hello guys,
> first want to say that I've been a happy user of Xen for about 6 
> months already - replaced bunch of old servers with just 2 machines 
> reducing power consumption and increasing reliability at the same time 
> (not speaking about systems maintenance!).
>
> But now I got a problem. In short - is it possible to "PCI 
> pass-though" to HVM guest the only graphical card on a physical server?
>
> I've been running several servers with Xen (3.4.2/3.4.3) with a bunch 
> of VMs (both PV and HVM, Win/Linux) and it works great. Now I have one 
> Windows application that seems can't be virtualized due to some 
> graphics activity (basically lot of grids needs to be displayed and 
> updated - and it all in Visual Basic) - neither standard VGA or cirrus 
> logic modes can render it so it would perform good enough. So the idea 
> is to give my physical server's card to this particular VM.
>
> I guess if I would have 2 video cards in the server passing through 
> the second card to HVM (windows 2003x32 server) would be not a 
> problem, would it? But if I only have 1 card - is it possible at all?
>
You can assign the only one gfx card to guest. then you need to access 
host via network or serial console, etc.

Regards,
Weidong

> Thank you,
> Alex