Nvidia support for Xen

[JaXXoN]

@Linrox: at least with the un-official nvidia-xen patches, xinerama and 3D worked fine for me!
So chances are good that an official xen support might work OOTB. xen is pretty advanced
and quite mature, but many people don't like the dual kernel approach. In the long term, i think
kvm (kernel based vm) will make the race. In this context: did anybody yet successfully operated
kvm with the nvidia driver?

regard

Bernhard

[Linrox]

@Jaxxon: I have only recently started experimenting with xen. Which un-official nvidia-xen patches are you speaking of, and is there a download / tut for installation?

regards

Linrox

[gilboa]

Originally Posted by Linrox

@Jaxxon: I have only recently started experimenting with xen. Which un-official nvidia-xen patches are you speaking of, and is there a download / tut for installation?

regards

Linrox

Second the above.
While I did manage to build the nVidia driver on a Xen kernel, the machine (Dual Opterons and Dual Clovertowns) hard locked the second I switch to X.

- Gilboa

[JaXXoN]

Originally Posted by Linrox

Which un-official nvidia-xen patches are you speaking of, and is there a download / tut for installation?

Once upon a time, i used the following one, but it is pretty out of date:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=78632

This one is newer, but probably also not the most recent one:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=95483

There is also a success report for Fedora 8 with 169.07:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=106395

Anyway, it typically needs some manual adjustment to get things
going. I recommend using the search function of the forum with "xen"
as the keyword for more details.

BTW.: anybody ever tried KVM with 3D on the host system?
The hack for 3D on the guest that i once did
(see http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/CoolConfigurations)
is certainly not a good solution for production systems. I think
the best variant would be if there would be a special driver
for the guest os that directly talks to a proxy process on the
host which in turn does the actual hardware access - this
is a little bit like AIGLX.

regards

Bernhard

[GJAOUEN]

Hello,

Just for info, I wanna try xen on my dell xps laptop today and see there's still no xen-aware driver source since three years. You'll find the answer from Nvidia about this subject :

**************************
Hello Guillame,

Thank you for contacting NVIDIA Customer Care.

Unfortunately there are still no firm plans to work under Xen.

Sorry I can't provide a schedule for this.

Let me know if any more questions.

Best regards,

Mike
NVIDIA Customer Care
**************************

Regards,
Guillaume.

[Felix.K]

I'd really like nvidia drivers to support XEN Dom0, because this will open many doors to desktop or multimedia virtualization, combined with the great strengths of XEN.
There are also some ways to get the driver working (see XEN - NVIDIA - STEP BY STEP), but there are still many bugs and trade-offs. In addition, it doesn't work directly with the installer and you need to compile the module manually. But I think the driver is probably not far away from working in XEN, because it already does somehow work and I recognized a REALLY GREAT performance gain with Windows XP Professional inside a HVM with SDL (The cursor was lagging extremously before, which made it nearly impossible to navigate through Window's menus, but with the driver it was much better and I gained a nearly normal cursor reaction).
I see that it would need many modifications to get e.g. Computer Games work inside a HVM, but it would be great to have them work just in Dom0 (and other multimedia applications, too).

Another thing about graphics inside a HVM or other DomU:
If the driver worked correctly in Xen Dom0, would it be possible to think about an extension to qemu-dm, which allows it to emulate some better graphics card than this Cirrhus Logic one, which even doesn't support 1280x1024 with 24 colour depth? Of course I'm thinking about emulating some NVIDIA cards, for example with some special combination of a qemu-dm extension and a nvidia driver (with support for those virtual NVIDIA devices), that communicate in some simplier way than with full emulation, probably some way of command forwarding, where the graphic operations of the DomU are forwarded to the Dom0 graphics driver directly. Probably, in some future it would be possible to split your 3D resources to multiple DomUs (one head for Win XP, one for Linux...).
I think this will not only serve the needs of a gamer, but also the needs of any future computer user (thinking of cuda getting more and more important in many different applications). In some future, graphic card virtualization will probably gain the same importance that CPU virtualization gained the last few years, if not only computer games, but also video encoding, encryption (probably also interesting for servers) and many other applications profit from using the graphic card for calculations.
This will probably stay a dream for some years, but I think it's worth thinking about that.

So I really encourage you to be the first graphics card supplier who supports XEN Dom0 (and probably later even DomU).

[nvbob]

The same problem as already described by Felix.K:

Hardware:
GA EP-35 DS4
Intel® Core2 Duo E6750
Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT
hd SAMSUNG HD321KJ Sata
----------------------
Debian- Unstable/Sid
vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (stock-kernel)
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.29-pkg1.run

Running above mentioned xen-kernel with nvidia.ko driver (compiled with NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.29-pkg1.run) produces the same problems as already described by Felix.K and others.
- the input /output in the terminals tty 1-6 are not visible, but they accept/react to keyboard inputs.


If I replace "Driver -"nvidia" with -"nv" in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf, the terminals tty 1-6 are working normaly.

lsmod | grep nv or lsmod | grep nvidia - doesn't show a loaded module nvidia in this case.

I suppose that vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-xen-686 has a buildin nvidia module which is loaded at boot time automatically.

Section "Device"
Identifier "GeForce 8800 GT"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "GeForce 8800 GT"
Driver "nv"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT"
EndSection

Maybe this could be helpful, as I am not an experienced linux user.

[meskalamdug]

Xen is very good tecnology,i hope someday
Nvidia make support for it.
Atm is unusable,i try both drivers:beta and stable for x86_64
2.6.29.6+xen patches from suse:drivers won't compile
2.6.31 pv ops:drivers compile fine but X hang and kernel oops

[Felix.K]

I also recognized the behaviour described above...

Well, in case of the SUSE forward-ports which are actually temporary solutions, it is probably too much work to get it work.
But the pv_ops dom0 Code will probably get into one of the next two mainline releases (2.6.33 or 2.6.34), so it would be great if the nvidia driver started to work on these kernels. But I think they will probably wait until the code is actually in a merge window...

[gilboa]

I would imagine that nVidia is well aware that a number of 2010 releases (E.g. F13) will only be shipped with dom0 enabled kernels (unless the pv_ops integration slows down considerably).

- Gilboa

[meskalamdug]

Originally Posted by Felix.K

I also recognized the behaviour described above...

Well, in case of the SUSE forward-ports which are actually temporary solutions, it is probably too much work to get it work.
But the pv_ops dom0 Code will probably get into one of the next two mainline releases (2.6.33 or 2.6.34), so it would be great if the nvidia driver started to work on these kernels. But I think they will probably wait until the code is actually in a merge window...

I agree.
I still hope.
Meanwhile:some patches around?

[meierkurt]

I know how i get this working.

But a real question: Xen is server virtualization. For what the hell somebody needs a 3D VGA on a server?

If you need desktop virtualization, there are much better products than Xen.