Direct Hardware Support using Xen and Windows Guest?

[T313C0mun1s7]

I have posted a link to this thread on the xen-users@lists.xensource.com mailing list, and received a reply. I believe it answered my questions.

Here is the reply I received:

I'm afraid you're a little ahead of the curve. Running Windows means full virtualization, which means performance loss. While the situation is getting better with hard disk/block file drivers and net drivers (see PV drivers for HVM from James Harper, Halsign, and proprietary approachs to PV drivers from various distros), the console is what really still suffers.

While direct hardware access is possible with pciback (hiding the pci device from the dom0 and passing it to a guest) in *theory*, in practice, read this list (xen-users) for awhile. People are getting it to work for some cards, and not others. Even if you can get a video card to pass through to your guest, that means you need a 2nd video card for your dom0 (or at least it makes setting things up a lot easier). And that's the situation for paravirtual (PV) guests. Support for passthrough for HVM is brand new and still being worked out in xen 3.2.x. Additionally (I believe) it requires Vt-d support to remap dma requests. Your processor may support intel vmx/Amd svm to get full virtuallization to work, but Vt-d is brand new. Even if you do have that hardware, better get your hacking shoes on!

My Reply:

I'm afraid you're a little ahead of the curve.

...

Support for passthrough for HVM is brand new and still being worked out in xen 3.2.x. Additionally (I believe) it requires Vt-d support to remap dma requests. Your processor may support intel vmx/Amd svm to get full virtuallization to work, but Vt-d is brand new. Even if you do have that hardware, better get your hacking shoes on!

This is exactly the information I was looking for. Based on your response I guess that my answer would be "not yet" so to speak. I will hold off on trying this just yet, but I will watch Xen closely and wait with baited breath for the day this might become possible. I have my doubts if it will come to fruition though. Now that Cirtix is involved, my goal is quite a way off from the Citrix push. Their website seems very geared towards server consolidation and thin client services; as would be expected, that is were the money is going to be.

I don't know how much the open source end of things are steered by the commercial side, but the situation I describe really would be the Holy Grail. I see it as a way to prove this platform for VM as the undisputed champion, and a way to rise above VMWare. If that were to happen the commercial values would certainly follow.

I will stay registered to the list for a while, as I imagine that I can learn quite a lot here - even if I am not ready to jump into the product quite yet.

Thank you Jim. As stated earlier I will report this back to the other forum.

[fjgaude]

Good things come to those who are patient. Thanks for sharing your discoveries with us.

[Ares Drake]

Hey there.

I can imagine how you feel T313C0mun1s7. Currently I am trying to accomplish the same as you want: A Xen3.2 host (=Dom0) with hardware passthrough to guests (=DomUs). I want to use a SCSI Controller for my Scanner in Win and a SATA controller in Solaris. The use of my second graphics card and a TV Card in a DomU would be a plus. However it is as you say: brand new uncharted territory. What I found out till now:

• Graphic
  
  Passthrough of graphics card is a little more difficult as those directly access the main memory. I have seen a report suggesting it works between paravirtualised guests. As of now, Windows cannot be paravirtualised. But graphiccard passthrough can be made to work with linux paravirtual guests. For me this would be enough though it probably doesn't help you. Reason it only works in "virtualisation-aware" aka paravirtual guests is that those see all the real main memory and know what their share is - Windows guests see only their share. So the memory access of the graphics card would screw up as memory adressing would missmatch.
• Windows
  
  With Xen3.2 it should be possible to passthrough the SCSI Card and the USB controller to Win. So your (USB?) dongles should work. For good Windows Performance in Xen you need to install special drivers in Windows however - much like the vmware tools in Vmware. I have not found working drivers for ubuntu's xen yet - though in the mailinglist answer you postet was a hint - I'll check it out. Plus, with 3.2 the package xen-ioemu-3.2 is missing - i don't know perhaps it is obsolete now with 3.2? However all tutorials on how to install Windows on Xen depend on that one. So the install doesn't work right now - or rather I don't know how to install windows in xen3.2.

Documentation is *VERY* sparse atm. I'd really like to get this to work. Though because of other projects my time is rather limited for the next 4 weeks. In case some of you are interested as well (and own IntelVT / AMD Parcifica enabled machines) we might just go ahead and collect and share our findings, problems and solutions here. If enough people are interested and participating (and it seems so) and everyone just helps a little bit, it might work out perfectly. So please don't be afraid to "put on the hacking shoe", together it is probably doable. Just post your findings here so that others can carry on where you run into a roadblock...

It would be more than great to get it to work!

[T313C0mun1s7]

Most legacy hardware dongles are plugged into the parallel port. For a while developers thought this was the most effective way to thwart software piracy.

One of my personal biggest concerns is the ability to use windows software that has no Linux counterpart such as Blindwrite, and some DVD ripping and Disk burning stuff. WAY BACK IN THE DAY printers were individually controlled by the software that printed to them, and it did not take long for people to figure out that moving that driver out of each individual software program and into the OS was the way to go (remember DOS printing), unfortunately optical disk burning still holds the drivers for every drive it needs to access in the userspace software, not the OS. This means userspace software needs direct access to the drives to burn CDs and DVDs, not a generic emulated drive. There are no other programs I have found that does the same thing that Exact Auto Copy in paranoid mode does, or Blindwrite, or DVDFab Platinum - they just don't exist in Linux.

[Ares Drake]

In theory you should be able to passthrough anything you can see by lspci. In a terminal just run sth like "lspci -vv > ~/lspci.txt" and have a look at that file in your home dir. So while you probably won't see your CD-ROM / Burner in there, you can passthrough the IDE / SATA Controller. I don't know if it works for single ports or just the whole bunch, so you might need a second controller - however some boards come with a second raid controller or sth.
Then you would not see the CDROM in linux but would have native and complete control in your virtual Windows.

Im trying to setup the GUI virt-manager as an easy way to manage the virtual machines. Once I got it running, I can test the above and will post results.
I seem to be stuck at this error message: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/198957
though I got the libvirt-bin installed. No clue whats missing...

[yanndinendal]

Plus, with 3.2 the package xen-ioemu-3.2 is missing - i don't know perhaps it is obsolete now with 3.2? However all tutorials on how to install Windows on Xen depend on that one. So the install doesn't work right now - or rather I don't know how to install windows in xen3.2.

Hi, I was looking for xen-ioemu-3.2 too, as xen-ioemu-3.1 is conflicting with every other xen 3.2 package, and I found nothing about it but your post...
Anyway, I've now found the answer here :

xen-3.2 (3.2.0-0ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

* Initial release based on 3.2.0 rc4.
* Updated build-depends.
* Added pciutils-dev to build-depends.
* Dropped xen-ioemu now in xen-utils.
* Dropped xen-docs.
* Dropped security fixes since it is now apart of upstream.
* Moved from dpatch in-favour of quilt.

-- Chuck Short <zulcss@ubuntu.com> Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:28:08 -0500

So it should work... but now I have another problem : I can't create any domain. I have the same problem on a Debian etch with xen 3.0...

root@MVDS1:~# xm create /etc/xen/VDS01.hvm
Using config file "/etc/xen/VDS01.hvm".
VNC= 1
Unexpected error: <type 'exceptions.OSError'>

Please report to xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/xm", line 10, in <module>
    main.main(sys.argv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 2535, in main
    _, rc = _run_cmd(cmd, cmd_name, args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 2559, in _run_cmd
    return True, cmd(args)
  File "<string>", line 1, in <lambda>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 1309, in xm_importcommand
    cmd.main([command] + args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/create.py", line 1190, in main
    dom = make_domain(opts, config)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/create.py", line 1053, in make_domain
    os.kill(vncpid, signal.SIGKILL)
OSError: [Errno 3] No such process

[lex1]

not the answer your looking for but if you go to howtoforge.com
you will see howto of xen on hardy if this is not specific to you you can ask a question in the forum


lex1

[hdtvrocks]

Hi guys,

Picked up an Asus P5E-VM DO Q35 board with VT-d to give Xen a go. My goal is to run an XP domU and give direct access to my DVB PCI cards to the XP guest. Don't need actual video playback, it's just recording and streaming to media clients. Anyhow, I noticed in my mobo manual that "Virtual Appliance" is supposed to be an option to turn enable or disable, but my bios doesn't give me that option and only gives me the Version.

Been following the Xen 3.2.0 on Hardy 8.0.4 How-To and managed to get a Xen SDL window to show, but it keeps failing with the error:

Error: Device 768 (vbd) could not be connected. losetup /dev/loop11 /xen/images/WinXP.img failed

I can't seem to get past this, let alone try VT-d.

UPDATE: According to the guys on #xen 2.6.24 isn't well supported and was forward patched for Xen. It is possible HVM support for Windows is broken for 2.6.24. I'm going to have to revert to 2.6.18 and will likely try a different distribution.

[hdtvrocks]

Just to let people know, I struggled with getting OpenSUSE 10.3 installed on my multi-HD system, finally got it running. Creating a Windows HVM DomU is GUI driven are simple as pie. BUT Xen only officially supports 2.6.18 and the OpenSUSE binaries are Xen 3.1.0. So while I had a stable Windows XP DomU, there's no VT-d support. Wasted another day, and now I'm onto CentOS 5.1 2.6.18 with the mercurial repo of Xen.

[yanndinendal]

root@MVDS1:~# xm create /etc/xen/VDS01.hvm
Using config file "/etc/xen/VDS01.hvm".
VNC= 1
Unexpected error: <type 'exceptions.OSError'>

Please report to xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/xm", line 10, in <module>
    main.main(sys.argv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 2535, in main
    _, rc = _run_cmd(cmd, cmd_name, args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 2559, in _run_cmd
    return True, cmd(args)
  File "<string>", line 1, in <lambda>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 1309, in xm_importcommand
    cmd.main([command] + args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/create.py", line 1190, in main
    dom = make_domain(opts, config)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xm/create.py", line 1053, in make_domain
    os.kill(vncpid, signal.SIGKILL)
OSError: [Errno 3] No such process

Ha :/ my mistake ! In fact, this error appears when the disk image hasn't been created before creating the DomU... So this was my fault, but the error message isn't explicit at all!
Hope it will help somebody.