2010/9/3 Rodrigo Campos <rodrigo@xxxxxxxxxxx>: > Hi! > > I wanted to know the status of PCI device assignment. > > As far as I can see in the webpage and in the mailing list, it seems to be > working ok if you have VT-d support on the motherboard and cpu. But if it isn't > too much trouble, I wanted some confirmation about this, since I'm not sure and > I don't want to buy hardware to test this when there is no way it's going to > work :) It highly depends on what you want to passthrough...if it's some well-known SR-IOV server NIC, then sure, it will probably work. If you want to passthrough various PCI devices in a regular desktop system or workstation, then forget it. I've been playing that "various PCI devices in a regular desktop system" game for the last 8 months on my HTPC. I've been running with both stable versions of KVM as well as self-compiled versions from git during this time. The tests I have performed were done on two different VT-d capable boards (a Gigabyte EQ45M-S2 and a Intel DQ57TM). I've tried to passthrough 2 PCI TV tuners (Hauppauge 500 + Hauppauge 1300), 2 PCI USB 2.0 cards (can't remember the brands), 1 onboard USB controller (on a Gigabyte EQ45M-S2), and finally a PCI Express USB 3.0 card (Asrock). The only device which works correctly, is the Hauppauge 500 card. I bought the USB 3.0 card ONLY to see if it would help with a PCI Express card instead of the regular PCI cards I had tested...but no, it didn't change anything. In my tests the cards "almost works" in some cases - eg. the card gets correctly initialized in the guest and you can start to use it, but then you'll have timing issues, driver crashes, client program crashes, etc. etc. Right now I'm awaiting RHEL 6 to see if passthrough has been improved here. If not, then as much as I would hate it, I'll switch back to Xen...people could passthrough all kinds of weird PCI cards 5 years ago with paravirtualization on Xen. Even though I see Xen as a dying platform, at least it works. Best Regards Kenni -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
