18 Setting Up a Virtual Machine Host #

There are several possibilities to dedicate a PCI device to a VM Guest:

After assigning the PCI device to the VM Guest, the guest system must care for the configuration and device drivers for this device.

Xen 4.0 and newer supports VGA graphics adapter pass-through on fully virtualized VM Guests. The guest can take full control of the graphics adapter with high-performance full 3D and video acceleration.

To enable VGA Pass-Through, add the following settings to your fully virtualized guest configuration file:

gfx_passthru=1
pci=['yy:zz.n']

where yy:zz.n is the PCI controller ID of the VGA graphics adapter as found with lspci -v on Dom0.

In some circumstances, problems may occur during the installation of the VM Guest. This section describes some known problems and their solutions.

Note: swiotlb a PV guest

The swiotlb=force kernel parameter is required for DMA access to work for PCI devices on a PV guest. For more information about IOMMU and the swiotlb option see the file boot-options.txt from the package kernel-source.

There are several resources on the Internet that provide interesting information about PCI Pass-Through:

Before you can pass through a USB device to the VM Guest, you need to identify it on the VM Host Server. Use the lsusb command to list the USB devices on the host system:

root # lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0461:4d15 Primax Electronics, Ltd Dell Optical Mouse
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

To pass through the Dell mouse, for example, specify either the device tag in the form vendor_id:device_id (0461:4d15) or the bus address in the form bus.device (2.3). Remember to remove leading zeros, otherwise xl would interpret the numbers as octal values.

In emulated USB, the device model (QEMU) presents an emulated USB controller to the guest. The USB device is then controlled from Dom0 while USB commands are translated between the VM Guest and the host USB device. This method is only available to fully virtualized domains (HVM).

Enable the emulated USB hub with the usb=1 option. Then specify devices among the list of devices in the config file along with other emulated devices by using host:USBID. For example:

usb=1
usbdevice=['tablet','host:2.3','host:0424:460']

PVUSB is a new high performance method for USB Pass-Through from dom0 to the virtualized guests. PVUSB supports both USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 devices. PVUSB uses paravirtualized front-end and back-end interfaces. With PVUSB, there are two ways to add USB devices to a guest:

PVUSB uses a paravirtualized front- and back-end interface. PVUSB supports USB 1.1 and USB 2.0, and it works for both PV and HVM guests. To use PVUSB, you need usbfront in your guest OS, and usbback in dom0 or usb back-end in qemu. On SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the USB back-end comes with qemu.

As of Xen 4.7, xl PVUSB support and hotplug support is introduced.

In the configuration file, specify USB controllers and USB host devices with usbctrl and usbdev. For example, in case of HVM guests:

usbctrl=['type=qusb,version=2,ports=4', 'type=qusb,version=1,ports=4', ]
usbdev=['hostbus=2, hostaddr=1, controller=0,port=1', ]

Note

It is important to specify type=qusb for the controller of HVM guests.

To manage hotplugging PVUSB devices, use the usbctrl-attach, usbctrl-detach, usb-list, usbdev-attach and usb-detach subcommands. For example:

Create a USB controller which is version USB 1.1 and has 8 ports:

root # xl usbctrl-attach test_vm version=1 ports=8 type=qusb

Find the first available controller:port in the domain, and attach USB device whose busnum:devnum is 2:3 to it; you can also specify controller and port:

root # xl usbdev-attach test_vm hostbus=2 hostaddr=3

Show all USB controllers and USB devices in the domain:

root # xl usb-list test_vm
Devid  Type   BE  state usb-ver ports
0      qusb   0   1     1       8
  Port 1: Bus 002 Device 003
  Port 2:
  Port 3:
  Port 4:
  Port 5:
  Port 6:
  Port 7:
  Port 8:

Detach the USB device under controller 0 port 1:

root # xl usbdev-detach test_vm 0 1

Remove the USB controller with the indicated dev_id, and all USB devices under it:

root # xl usbctrl-detach test_vm dev_id

For more information, see https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_USB_Passthrough.