XCP & XenCenter: Add an intuitive mechanism for configuring PCI passthrough
Even if PCI passthrough in XCP isn’t quite ready for primetime, please add to XenCenter (or some other gui based application) an intuitive mechanism for configuring PCI passthrough at least as an “experimental” feature for the the early adopters.
In may situation, although most of my VMs are non-graphical servers, I hope to add at least one VM that includes a full graphical desktop and has access to selected local hardware, including PCI slots, USB controllers, etc. So a more more intuitive approach for configuring PCI passthrough would be a huge help.
Yes, I now know (after spending lots of time searching) that PCI passthrough can be configured in XCP via the xe command line. But that approach is far from intuitive and is not very well-known.
I’ll just add that posts requesting how to configure PCI passthough in XCP are becoming increasingly prevalent: For example, see:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.xen.user/55047
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/xen/api/262029 do=post_view_threaded
Gizmo Chicken
shared this idea
3 comments
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Gizmo Chicken
commented
Thanks Mike. I shared my suggestion with the folks at Xen Orchestra. They seem genuinely interested, but have their hands full plate at the moment. I'm hoping they will add such a feature once they have all the basic functionality worked out.
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Mike Bursell
commented
Gizmo - thanks for the request. It's garnered lots of votes, which suggests, as you mentioned, that it's of growing interest in the community. I'm going to work to see what the options are here.
One possible approach would be via https://xen-orchestra.com/, which is an OSS GUI for Xen and XCP - have you considered contributing there? It's certainly not the only approach, but I though it was worth mentioning here.
Thanks for contributing.
-Mike.
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Gizmo Chicken
commented
If adding the above requested mechanism to XenCenter isn't possible in the near term, adding a menu-based mechanism to xsconsole for configuring PCI passthrough would be an equally helpful alternative.
