[vfio-users] Hardware support explanation

[Okky Hendriansyah]

On December 3, 2015 at 18:11:00, Francois Delalleau (f.delalleau at openmailbox.org) wrote:
Hi all,
Hi Francois,

I discover recently VFIO support for gpu pass-through. I need both linux and windows, and really love to get windows on a VM.
But as I'm not familiar with low level code, I need some explanation on hardware :
Is VFIO support usage of a Intel HD Graphics for host and a pci-e gpu for the windows guest?
Yes, I think most of us here who has Intel HD Graphics are using it solely for the host and the dedicated PCI-e ones for the guests.

I found on http://vfio.blogspot.fr that 1155 processor can be used. I suppose that 1156 (i7-6xxx) can be used to?
Are you referring to LGA-1155 and LGA-1156? I confused since you wrote "(i7-6xxx)” seems like you were asking about Sky Lake platform? Ideally any Intel processors which has Intel VT-d feature should be able to do this, but currently your safest bet should be on Haswell, Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge platforms, as well as their extreme siblings, Haswell-E, Ivy Bridge-E, Sandy Bridge-E platforms. Sky Lake users are quite rare to found. Also there’s a user contributed HCL here [1].

For gpu, I understood that Nvidia 9xx series can be used, but is 9xxM can be used to? The plan is to use a clevo laptop, so gpu is an M version...
I think it’s harder to do it on a laptop, but I won’t comment more on this since I never done this before.

And one last question, there has some restriction on distribution? I work on Debian stable (jessy at this time), do I need to rebuilt kernel?
There should be no distribution restriction. The most stable kernel is 4.1.x as of now, kernel 4.2.x is broken if you want to use UEFI guests via OVMF. Kernel 4.3.x need another patch to work with OVMF [2]. You probably need to patch your kernel [3] if your platform is other than Xeon E5, Haswell-E, Ivy Bridge-E, Sandy Bridge-E, but it depends on your IOMMU grouping and your devices. If you want to do VGA passthrough, and want to use Intel HD Graphics as your host’ graphics, then you need to patch your kernel with [4].

Thank's in advance for your responses to my (newbie) questions! 


[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LnGpTrXalwGVNy0PWJDURhyxa3sgqkGXmvNCIvIMenk

[2] http://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm/msg123325.html

[3] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/5/30/513

[4] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/5/9/517



Best regards,

-- 
Okky Hendriansyah
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/attachments/20151203/f571806b/attachment.htm>