[SeaBIOS] Graphics card pass-through working with two pass pci-initialization

André Weidemann Andre.Weidemann at web.de
Thu May 26 23:19:51 CEST 2011


On 27.05.2011 21:50, André Weidemann wrote:
> On 27.05.2011 21:40, André Weidemann wrote:
>
>> If I am not mistaken then the graphics card needs 2 bars, one with 256MB
>> and one with 128K. The sound card then needs 1 bar with 16K of PCI
>> memory.
>> How big is the PCI memory with seabios?
>> Is there really not enough space to "squeeze" in those extra 16K?
>
> I obviously forgot to add up the other memory that is used...
> 32MB go to the standard VGA card. Running qemu-kvm with "-vga none" did
> not work, so I left it in. And the e1000 NIC needs another 128K.
>
> I'll see if I can get rid of the standard VGA card. I guess that should
> free enough memory for the sound card.

I did some more testing by starting the VM with the paramter "-vga none" 
and passed both the VGA card and the sound card to it. With this option 
the VM did not boot, but I could use the monitor to take a look at the 
PCI bar assignment. Even though the memory for the standard VGA card is 
freed, the soundcard does not seem to get the 16K bar it needs. "info 
pci" for the sound card still looks like this:
  Bus  0, device   5, function 0:
     Audio controller: PCI device 8086:3a3e
       IRQ 10.
       BAR0: 32 bit memory at 0xffffffffffffffff [0x00003ffe].

Does anyone have an idea why there was no bar assigned?
Can the kernel be too old? (2.6.35.7.)

Just to test whether or not two devices can be assigned, I passed 
through 2 sound cards. (There is an onbard sound card and the Radeon has 
one too).

Each sound card gets its bar assigned as you can see:
   Bus  0, device   4, function 0:
     Audio controller: PCI device 1002:aa80
       IRQ 10.
       BAR0: 32 bit memory at 0xfebf0000 [0xfebf3fff].
       id ""
   Bus  0, device   5, function 0:
     Audio controller: PCI device 8086:3a3e
       IRQ 10.
       BAR0: 32 bit memory at 0xfebf4000 [0xfebf7fff].

but the sound cards do not show inside the Windows VM.

With both sound cards still passed to the VM I then booted an Ubuntu 
10.10 image instead of Windows7. It got as far as starting gdm, but then 
the entire host and VM became very slow.
The last message I saw on the terminal before gdm started was this:
[   23.030016 ] hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout, switching to 
single_cmd mode: last cmd=0x000f0000
[   29.290017 ] hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout, switching to 
single_cmd mode: last cmd=0x200f0000

So it seems there is a problem of some kind when 2 devices are passed to 
a VM.
Did anyone else ever notice anything similar?

Regards
  André



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