Pushing a graphics card into a VM, part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Okay, so virt-manager did pick up my new VM once I created it with xm create on a config file, but when I rebooted the system the VM was gone. So how can I fix this? Well, by taking advantage of functionality that OpenSUSE has had for auto-starting Xen virtual machines all along: Just move my config file into /etc/xen/auto and it'll auto start (and auto shutdown, if I have the xen tools installed) at system boot.

Of course, that requires a config file. Rather than paste it here, I'll let you view the config file as a text file. Note that 'gfx_passthru=1' is commented out. The Xen documentation says I need it, but if I put it there, my VM doesn't start up -- it crashes into the QEMU monitor. Also I ran into another issue, a timing issue. pciback is grabbing the console away from Linux and leaving the video card half-initialized, and when Xen grabs the video card and shoves it into the VM, the video card locks up the system solid when Windows tries to write to it. My solution to that was even simpler -- put the older of the nVidia cards back into the system, and load the 'nouveau' driver using YaST's System > Kernel > INITRD_MODULES and System > Kernel > MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT functionality. This flips the console away from the ATI card early enough that it doesn't conflict with Xen giving the video card to Windows. This also gives me a Linux console on the nVidia card that I can switch to by plugging in a second keyboard to the front USB on my chassis (the one I did *not* push into the Windows VM) and flipping my monitor to its DVI input (rather than the HDMI coming from the ATI card).

With all of this done, I can now reboot my system and get Windows on video card 0, and Linux on video card 1. I suppose I could reverse the video cards (to give the boot video card to Linux), unfortunately my board puts the second 16-lane PCIe slot too close to the bottom of the case and a double-width PCIe card won't fit there. Maybe when I upgrade to one of those spiffy SuperMicro server motherboards with the IMPI and such, at which point I won't need a second video card anyhow because the on-board video will suffice for Linux...

Next up in Part 5: Thoughts and conclusions.