Re: [Qemu-devel] PCI access virtualization

[Mark Williamson]

> I'm wondering if it would be possible to modify QEMU such that VMs could
> access PCI devices on the host system. And, if it would be possible at
> all, how much work this would be.

Sounds doable but would require a fair bit of hacking - I think the idea of 
doing this under QEmu came up once before in the 2004/2005 timeframe.

For the record, Intel also implemented Emulation + PCI passthrough for their 
SoftSDV project, but that also included extra hardware to allow the virtual 
machine to control an entire PCI bus, not just one device.  (the goal here 
was to have a working IA64 "hardware" platform before IA64 silicon was 
available).

> I vaguely heard of a feature present in Xen, which allows to assign PCI
> devices to one of the guests. I understand Xen works different than
> QEMU, but maybe is would be possible to implement something similar.

Yep, Xen 2.0 supports this.  Support is currently broken in Xen 3.0 (because 
PCI is handled differently) but will be coming back once somebody decides 
what approach we should use and implements it.

Cheers,
Mark

>
> Any comments appreciated, thanks in advance.
>
> Bye, Mike
>
>
>
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