Xen GPU passthrough

[JacobBrown1000]

Hay anyone know if the Xen GPU passthrough or HDX works in the Xen Hypervisor kernel and if this kernel can be compiled to use Ubuntu as the host.

[Cheesemill]

Have you read the documentation?
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough

PCI passthrough is a standard feature of Xen, so should work fine with a standard Xen setup.

The first question is do your CPU and motherboard actually support PCI passthrough?
Your CPU needs to either have VT-d (Intel) or IOMMU (AMD) extensions as well as a motherboard that supports them.

[JacobBrown1000]

I have a dual procsessor quad core Intel server, a Acer aspire laptop with a core two from Intel and a Zotac with a quad core Intel. All have NVIDEA graphics cards. I don't know if they sopport PCI passthrough ore not.

[Cheesemill]

Look up your specific Intel processors on the Intel Ark site and see if they support the VT-d extension.
http://ark.intel.com/

Then look up your specific motherboards on the relevant manufacturers site and see if they support the VT-d extension.

I'm pretty sure that PCI passthrough is only supported on the later Xeon processors though.

[JacobBrown1000]

The server looks OK for VT-D but not the others. Do I have any options? I was hoping to install Windows for some games that don't work on Wine, I have heard of some virtualization software's that use the CPU as a GPU rather then pass through to real hardware. Is that an option with Xen? I know the passthrough offers more transparency to hardware and faster speed but by how much compared to others?

And thanks for your promptness by the way.