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Setting Up A Xen Graphics Card Pass-Through

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  • Setting Up A Xen Graphics Card Pass-Through

    Phoronix: Setting Up A Xen Graphics Card Pass-Through

    For those wanting to setup a Xen VGA pass-through configuration whereby your host graphics card can be controlled by a guest operating system, like Windows within Linux, here's a guide how to setup this interesting feature...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Why don't they just make a little check box inside the gui (within the configuration settings) which enables or disables the function?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by halfmanhalfamazing View Post
      Why don't they just make a little check box inside the gui (within the configuration settings) which enables or disables the function?
      errmm which gui? LOL

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      • #4
        Holy crap! So many (complicated) steps... that whole process is so error prone that I wonder if anyone else managed to pull it off.

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        • #5
          If someone ever manages to get it running, is it possible to get summary performance result for it ? (I can't even get my monitor correctly modeset, so...)

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Morpheus View Post
            If someone ever manages to get it running, is it possible to get summary performance result for it ? (I can't even get my monitor correctly modeset, so...)
            I got it running a while back with Xen 4.1.2 and a Radeon 6950 2GB, get around 60% of my 3Dmark 2011 score compared to running native. But i don't know how much that is CPU or memory bound, I only gave the VM 2 cores + 2 threads and 4GB memory.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by jrch2k8 View Post
              errmm which gui? LOL
              Ehhhhhh heh :-)

              I was being a bit sarcastic. But not really. I understand the necessity of having CLI powers and certainly that should always be the case, but any major software undertaking that doesn't have an easy to use GUI at this stage.......... They're just royally screwing up.

              We're not running linux 1.0 anymore. All these distributions have modernized.

              It's time they woke up and smelled the GUI.

              Have you ever used virtualbox or qemu/kvm? Now that's how virtualization is supposed to be! Now granted, virtual box seems buggy beyond belief to me, but it has such great potential. Both are beautiful programs, and so easy to use.

              And yes, I can fully appreciate that new features hit the CLI first, and the GUI catches up later. But no GUI at all?

              Last edited by halfmanhalfamazing; 23 March 2012, 09:40 PM.

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              • #8
                Hey, that's my screensaver !
                Test signature

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                • #9
                  No gui at all is exactly why I use qemu and not vbox. No I don't want to "create a VM". No I don't want to wade through settings windows to tick a box.

                  I want to boot this iso. I don't want it to leave a "Virtual machine configuration file" behind. Maybe next I want to boot a different iso with this amount of ram and this disk. Again, without a GUI getting in the way and forcing annoying paradigms on me ("yes you need to create a .vmx file", "yes you need to click through this wizard just to boot an iso").

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                  • #10
                    I'm started using XEN HVM with VGA Passthrough last year and i gathered some decent experience.
                    In my opinion the tutorial is quiet over complicated. It describes primary passthrough. But i would suggest to secondary passthrough.
                    The difference that the OS e.g.(windows) switches the output of the graphic card. With that approach you can skip step 1 to 8. You can still watch the boot process with vnc.

                    One of the pitfalls is that if you graphic card has a hdmi output you have to hide the soud device as well.
                    If you really wanna play games inside your HVM you should also passthrough a usb hub to use mouse and keyboard natively. I tried synergy instead and it had a very poor performance. Additionally i bought a usb soude device, because no emulated soud device worked for me.

                    I'm currently not at home. But if you want i can post my config later.

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