PCI Passthrough on ANY vm solutions?

T

techguy101

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Jan 14, 2009
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Hi Guys,

I'm desperately looking for a solution that will allow me to run a VM which allows the guest to directly access the PCI (PCIex) devices plugged into the Host machine.

Currently I must run my media server software (SageTV) on the main install which as a result is limited to 4GB RAM and Windows 7 Home.

I'd like to VM Win7 for Sage and install Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS as the main Host machine.

Does anybody have any experience with XEN, I read somewhere that it may be possible with this, but I know nothing about that.

Any ideas, or has anybody else tried this before?

EDIT: I haven't yet bought the tuner cards so would I be better to just get USB versions?

Thanks in advance.
 
ESXi DirectPath can pass through a PCI card, However i have found many PCI cards are not seen by ESXi to pass through
 
Ah ok,

I'm not really sure I want to go through the hassle of learning to set up ESXi to find out I can use my PCI cards.
 
KVM can do PCI passthrough. VirtualBox just introduced it for linux hosts, you can try that as well but you will be an early adopter.
 
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I currently have an ESXi server that passes through an Areca RAID card to a Server 2008 guest, I also plan on putting in a tuner card and passing that through, if I get to that soon I will let you know...
 
Thanks for the replies guys.. It looks there is some hope for me.

When I get some time i'll try out the various solutions and see how I get on.

@OldSchool That'd be great .. looking forward to hearing from you, cheers!
 
techguy101 said:
Thanks for the replies guys.. It looks there is some hope for me.

When I get some time i'll try out the various solutions and see how I get on.

@OldSchool That'd be great .. looking forward to hearing from you, cheers!
Click to expand...

Sorry you wake all of you up...

Did you have any luck? I spent the last two days trying to get xen and my AMD processor to pass through a tv tuner. No luck... Kept saying the device was not owned by the correct service...
 
I use Xen and I do some PCI passthrough and I have to ask what do you want to pass through.

If it's a tuner, these things are notorious for not working passthrough on anything. If you have a USB tuner I suggest Virtualbox and USB passthrough -- vbox has the best USB passthrough of anything I used so far.

If you want to do video passthrough, I've done video cards but only as a secondary card. As in I only used it for GPGPU, I haven't actually tried to use it as a video card and it's different if you're trying to do that. There's documentation on how to do it though so maybe it works.

Feel free to PM me if you choose Xen, my guess is it's not so popular on these forums. Just a couple of tips to get you started with passthrough; upstream Xen bundled on the Debian repositories for 3.1+ kernel will have xen-pciback compiled as a module, whereas most tutorials are for 2.6 custom xen kernel will have it compiled-in. This also means they changed driver name from pciback to xen-pciback. Most tutorials will tell you to add stuff to bootloader; that won't work. On debian you add that stuff to /etc/modprobe.d/xen-pciback.conf (just say "options xen-pciback hide=(0000:03:00.0)" or whatever the PCI address you want to passthrough). I also had to blacklist the driver responsible for the device on the host. No matter how I tried to get xen-pciback to claim the device first it just wouldn't work the original driver always claimed it unless I blacklisted it. So if you have two (or more) e1000e NICs you can't just passthrough one of them and leave the other to the host. Which is why I guess they compiled it in on the custom kernels.
 
Hi levk,

Sorry about the delay in replying. I'm sorry to say that I got buried into other things over the past few months and had to put that project on the back burner for a while.

It's on my resolution list for the new year ;) If I have any success i'll update this thread.

Regards
 
i tried to do tuner card. Windows 7 saw it but was only able to stream 3 or so minutes of live tv before the card quit. Rebooting of the vm fixed it every time. I killed vmware and went direct w/ windows 7 on the box.
 
Hi

I have this problem (Pci (Tuner) passthrough) too. Is nt really any way to solve it. I need to install them in Cent Os 5. but how?....
 
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