Re: [Xen-users] [REQUEST] Request for Xen Users to Attempt Jean David Techer's Xen 4.2-unstable VGA Passthrough Documentation

[Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>]

On 3/31/12, Casey DeLorme <cdelorme@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Pasi,
>
> I can confirm that their GPU Passthrough works with consumer models, they
> visited my college and presented a 30 minute demonstration video where they
> acknowledged this.
>
> Wei stated that XenClient ahs a "customized ATI component", and I am quite
> certain he is aware our discussion is about consumer models.
>
>
> XenClient comes with XenDesktop, they market to the on-the-go businessman
> so it was designed with laptops in mind, but I am quite sure it would run
> on a tower.
>
> ~Casey
>

As far as I know, XenClient AMD GPU passthrough only works on 8 models
of HP laptops. This is because it uses filtered passthrough in which
the dom0 graphics server does some extremely model-specific voodoo
with contexts (presumably involving rewriting of GPU commands to limit
them to a particular region of graphics memory) to share the GPU. Poor
support for AMD GPUs in XenClient is a big part of why I am making my
own desktop Xen/Linux distribution, OpenXCI
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxci/>. It will support both
primary and secondary AMD GPU passthrough (rather than XenClient-style
filtered passthrough, it will use conventional passthrough for one
domain and a viewer running on that domain to display all other
domains).