Xen users - Dec 2012 - VGA-Passthrough: Driver suggestion for Nvidia GT 520

Dear list,
currently I have a Debian Wheezy with Kernel 3.6.6 and Xen 4.2 as Dom0
and an Ubuntu 12.04 as a HVM DomU with vga passthrough for my Nvidia
GT 520 card working. Hardware is a Gigabyte  GA-890FXA-UD5 with IOMMU
and an Athlon II. I used the howto by David Techer to get my card
running.

Currently I can only use the driver version 275.xx of the nvidia
closedsource driver. All newer versions do not work (I guess this is
known).

I want to update my DomU and I want to use this DomU as a mediacenter
with XBMC, so I need 2D acceleration.

Has someone experiences with using an other driver like the open
source nouveau driver? I don''t care how fast the driver is as long as
it is fast enough für HD movies.
Any hinds where I can get some more support for the closed source
driver would also be great expect the official nvidia support forum.

Thanks!

Ben

Ben,

I tried to get my Nvidia GT 610 working in a setup similar to yours and
experienced more headaches than I could count.  Ultimately, I gave up on
Nvidia and replaced it with an AMD 6670 Radeon, which I bought on sale for
about $50.

At present, I''m using my AMD 6670 with Ubuntu 12.10 as dom0 in
conjunction
with the open source driver, and it works great for watching HD movies and
so forth.  (I haven''t tried graphic intensive applications, such as
games.)  I also tested AMD''s proprietary "Catalyst" driver,
but the open
source driver works well enough for my purposes.

Although I''m currently using my AMD 6670 with dom0, I did test it
briefly
using VGA passthrough with an HVM domU and it worked just fine, but I
don''t
recall which driver (proprietary or open source) worked better.

One quirk with the AMD 6670 Radeon:  At least when using with dom0, to get
HDMI audio output working with the open source driver, I had to edit the
"GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" line in "/etc/default/grub" to
read as follows:

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.audio=1"

What, if anything, you''ll have to do to get HDMI audio output working
when
using with domU, I can''t say for sure.

Hope the above helps.

Best regards,
GizmoChicken



On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 3:08 AM, Benjamin Schweikert <
b.schweikert@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Dear list,
> currently I have a Debian Wheezy with Kernel 3.6.6 and Xen 4.2 as Dom0
> and an Ubuntu 12.04 as a HVM DomU with vga passthrough for my Nvidia
> GT 520 card working. Hardware is a Gigabyte  GA-890FXA-UD5 with IOMMU
> and an Athlon II. I used the howto by David Techer to get my card
> running.
>
> Currently I can only use the driver version 275.xx of the nvidia
> closedsource driver. All newer versions do not work (I guess this is
> known).
>
> I want to update my DomU and I want to use this DomU as a mediacenter
> with XBMC, so I need 2D acceleration.
>
> Has someone experiences with using an other driver like the open
> source nouveau driver? I don''t care how fast the driver is as long
as
> it is fast enough für HD movies.
> Any hinds where I can get some more support for the closed source
> driver would also be great expect the official nvidia support forum.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ben
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@lists.xen.org
> http://lists.xen.org/xen-users
>

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xen.org
http://lists.xen.org/xen-users