[Libvir] Adding devices to a vm using virsh

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Thu Apr 24 13:43:45 UTC 2008


On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 10:59:27AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 12:53:50PM +0300, Gabriel Kaufmann wrote:
> > I need to be able to attach a PCI device to an existing machine.
> > I know that in Xen's configuration file we need to add a line
> > PCI=[....]
> > The problem is that I didn't find any documentation on what the
> > parametes are.
> >
> > When looking at virsh, there's an 'attach' function, but the only
> > documented devices are disk and Ethernet card.
> >
> > Does anyone knows what is the format for adding a generic PCI card
> > (or specifically, a Teradici card) using virsh attach
> 
> Unfortunately I'm pretty sure we don't support adding arbitrary
> devices (ie. PCI pass-thru).

That is correct - once the host device enumeration stuff is done we'll
be in a better position to address this limitation, because we'll at
least be able to figure what devices are available for passthrough.

Passthrough in Xen at least is quite a complex thing requiring multiple
admin steps outside the context of the guest config file which makes
it rather unpleasant to deal with. I'm honestly not sure how this will
map into the API, because I'd rather like this steps to not be exposed
to users.

> You should be able to do this by starting the domain using an ordinary
> Xen configuration file.

It also needs manual setup of the pciback driver & steps to hide the device
from the host drivers.  The Xen wiki is best place to look

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Assign_hardware_to_DomU_with_PCIBack_as_module

Dan.
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