I previously reported this on the centos mailing list:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-November/085672.html
And I've found out that Red Hat has backported the VT-d support from Xen 3.3 to RHEL 5.4.
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-November/085677.html
It seams to me that the "classic" Xen pci-passthru (up to Xen 3.2) works only on some minor cases as described here (when using the new kernel and hypervisor): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=514458#c4
The recommendation seams to be (although not stated at any documentation) to use the VT-d support for various reasons (better security for the guests when accessing the hardware I guess).
My concern is that the hardware I use does not support VT-d (it is a Intel 5000P chipset, ~2 years old) so I believe I'm kind of screwed. Or keep using the kernel and Xen packages from 5.3 (not a good option either).
Am I the only one bitten by this?
On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 01:57:42PM -0200, Miguel Di Ciurcio Filho wrote:
I previously reported this on the centos mailing list:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-November/085672.html
And I've found out that Red Hat has backported the VT-d support from Xen 3.3 to RHEL 5.4.
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-November/085677.html
It seams to me that the "classic" Xen pci-passthru (up to Xen 3.2) works only on some minor cases as described here (when using the new kernel and hypervisor): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=514458#c4
The recommendation seams to be (although not stated at any documentation) to use the VT-d support for various reasons (better security for the guests when accessing the hardware I guess).
My concern is that the hardware I use does not support VT-d (it is a Intel 5000P chipset, ~2 years old) so I believe I'm kind of screwed. Or keep using the kernel and Xen packages from 5.3 (not a good option either).
Yeah.. VT-d support is only on most recent chipsets, and many BIOSes still have broken implementations of it :(
Am I the only one bitten by this?
Yeah I guess.. so far..
-- Pasi
Is there a current list of the required "matchups" to migrating guests from one Xen host to another?
I doesn't appear to me that paravirtualized machines have much in the way of obstacles. Hardware doesn't seem to play into it. What about Xen kernel matchups, say from a Xen 3.4 to a Xen 3.1?
How fussy is the HVM migration? Would moving an HVM from an AMD64 Athlon X4 AMD chipset to an Opteron X4 nVidia chipset have issues? What about a "hybrid" HVM-PV, like Windows 2008 with GPLPV drivers installed and where you have installed to a chipset as an HVM and then swapped to a PV?
I'm going to begin trying, but some time-saving tips, or a checklist, would be welcomed.
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Ben M. -
Miguel Di Ciurcio Filho -
Pasi Kärkkäinen