What is pci-passthrough and how to do it with xen in RHEL5?

The informations below are specific to RHEL5 and could be applied to fc6 and above.

Pci passthrough is used to exclusively export a pci device to a paravirtualized or fully virtualized guest rather than sharing that for guests and dom0. While doing this, the exported pci device wouldn't be available for dom0 and any other guests. Ex, NIC.

Paravirtualized guests: Pci passthrough should work on RHEL5 guests. It's not expected to work on rhel4 PV guests. PCI passthrough requires support in both dom0 (backend) and in the guest (front end). This front end support has not been implemented in RHEL4 PV kernel yet.

Fully Virtualized guest: Not supported. PCI passthrough to fully virtualized guests requires special hardware support. This is called VT-d on intel paltform and IOMMU on AMD platform. (AMD is yet to release such a hardware). Even if someone possesses this hardware, it requires support in xen code and the RHEL version of xen doesn't have this code.

Bottom line. PCI passthrough would work only if the guest is RHEL5 PV and fc6 and above guests. Below is details on how to configure this.

- Get the pci id of a pci device in dom0 by running "lspci".

- Hide the pci device from dom0. I added the below entry in my /etc/modprobe.conf to hide my Broadcom network card from dom0 which uses bnx2 driver and rebooted dom0. Change it to suite your requirement

install bnx2 /sbin/modprobe pciback ; /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install bnx2
options pciback hide=(0000:09:00.0) verbose_request=1

- Pass the deivce through by adding the below line in /etc/xen/ file.

pci = [ "0000:09:00.0" ]