XEN: Giving guest complete control over NIC(s).

[Gilboa Davara]

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 09:19 -0700, list user wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > I'm installing Xen on a machine with multiple Gbps NICs that I'm using
> > for driver development.
> > Is there a way to give the guest complete control over a number of these
> > NICs without having the host to route/bridge the traffic to the guest?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> 1) use "lspci" to determine which PCI slots the network cards occupy
> 2) Hide them from dom0:  in dom0's grub.conf add "pciback.hide(xx:yy.z)"
>     to the kernel boot parameters. e.g.
>       "module /vmlinuz-2.6.16-xen ro root=/dev/vg0/fc4 \
>       "pciback.hide=(aa:aa.a)(bb:bb.b)"
>     Multiple slots may be hidden by adding additional parentheticized
>     slot info.  *Don't use quotes* inside the parens.
> 3) give the selected pci slots to the domU by adding a corresponding
>     line to its config file: e.g into /etc/xen/vm1 add:
>       "pci = ['aa:aa.a','bb:bb.b']"
>      Multiple slots are given within the brackets, *separated by commas*,
>      *quotes are required* within the brackets.
> 
> As of 3.0.2 exported pci slots crash domUs when when trying to 
> automagically save/restore domUs using xendomains or the other tools. 
> They will require clean boots.
> 
> Hope that helps.

Thanks!
Should I assume I expect near-native performance, right?

I'll give it a try later this week.

Gilboa