AMD Fusion GPU passthrough to KVM or Xen

Posted by BigChief on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by BigChief
Published on 2011-12-03T18:11:26Z Indexed on 2012/06/24 9:17 UTC
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Has anyone successfully gotten a passthrough working with the GPU portion of AMD's Fusion APUs (the E-350 is my target) on top of a Linux hypervisor? IE, I want to dedicate the GPU to one VM only, excluding all other VMs as well as the host. I know PCI passthrough can work with patches / kernel rebuilds for Xen and KVM. However, since the GPU is on the same chip, I don't know if the host OS will see it as PCI.

I know there are a number of tangential issues here, such as:

  • Poor Fusion drivers in Linux at the moment
  • Unsuccessful patching efforts seem common
  • VT-d / IOMMU is required and (from my reading) is supported on the APU, but the motherboard may not offer it
  • KVM doesn't appear to support primary graphics cards, only secondary graphics cards (described here)

However, I'd like to hear from anyone who has messed with this, even failed attempts. Fedora + KVM is my preferred virtualization platform but I'm willing to change that if it makes a difference.

EDIT: The goal is to do this for a Windows 7 guest (I know it's asking a lot). Regardless, just assume this is HVM, not PV.

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