I recently managed to get PCI Passthrough to work for a Windows HVM
operating under Xen 3.2 on Fedora 8. I needed to get USB ports passed
through to the Windows VM with full hot plug functionality and I was able to
get that working using a Dell 755 with a USB PCI expansion card. However,
when trying to bring the box up to an operational status status I have
encountered some rather severe stability problems. What happens is that
about 5 minutes after first using the USB device (successfully without any
issues), a subsequent insertion causes the Windows XP "System" process
to
instantly run away to 99% CPU usage, the USB device is not detected and the
only fix is to reboot Dom0. Shuting down the Windows VM has no effect and
it goes back to spinning as soon as the System process is initialized during
bootup. Eventually repeted shuting down of the spinning VM results in a
hard crash/immediate reboot of the host machine, no kernel panic or
anything, just immediate reboot. Once the host machine is rebooted (hard
crash or not) the problem goes away temporarily, but returns 100% of the
time. I should also mention that when I create the Windows VM I get Xem
errors complaining of recieving an NMI and I might have a hardware problem,
but the VM starts anyway.
I know that the PCI Passthrough system is not that robust and people have
said that it makes Xen much less stable. I was hoping that someone should
let me know if there is any way to fix/mitigate my problem or if, at this
time, there is nothing to be done.
Thanks in advance.
_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
