This is a very interesting feature which provides you the capability of passing a “PCI” device to a guest system bypassing the HOST .
Below Red Hat kbase gives you information about doing pci pass-through with XEN.
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-17364
With KVM , pci pass-through can be achieved by two ways.
* virt-manager
* Command line method.
PCI pass-through is a virtualization-related ability that is enabled by AMD’s IOMMU and Intel’s VT-d technologies.
Ref:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.4/html/Technical_Notes/libvirt.html
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-05-07_Virtualization_KVM_PCI_Device_Assignment
Virt-Manager :
Virt-manager with version ‘0.6.1’ or greater should support PCI passthrough by performing below steps:
* In VM Details click on the tab ” Hardware” , then click on “Add Hardware” .
* Now select ‘Hardware type’ as “Physical host device”.
* The next window will provide you with two drop-down boxes called “Device Type” and “Device”
* Select Device Type as “PCI device” .
* Now select the approprite pci device ( verify the pci information from #lspci command in the HOST system ) which you want to pass through as “Device”.
* Click on “Finish”.
Command Line :
Below is the upstream link which describes the command line steps to achieve the same.
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_to_assign_devices_with_VT-d_in_KVM
thats it…