Forest Bond wrote:
Hi,
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 08:07:33PM -0500, Kendrick wrote:
Since this peeked my intrest and im almost to the point to have some
time... does any one have/ work with vt-d enabled systems and or gotten
guest assigned videocards yet? I am stuck at either replacing my
current systemboard with its vt-d equivelant
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon1333/5400/X7DWA-N.cfm
or getting a desktop grade system that supports a single quadcore with
processor /vid/memory both work out to close enough in price range. I
was hoping some one could verify that xen or one of the free vm's is
workably able to assign the/a video card to the guest os (winblows). I
have several apps that dont take kindly to software video. both older
3d games and some business apps do horably if it doesnt have 2d/3d
hardware support.
Um, I have no idea what vt-d is. Can you fill me in?
Thanks,
Forest
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:ZUrl79NxA5kJ:communities.intel.com/
openport/blogs/server/tags/idf+video+card+assignment+%22vt.d%22&hl=en&ct
=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&client=firefox-a
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-virtualization-technology-for-directed-io-vt-d-enhancing-intel-platforms-for-efficient-virtualization-of-io-devices
Assigning a video card or a network or storage card to a virtual
machine. the biggest boost is a high end raid or giving a windows guest
a video card to play games from.
those 2 areas could see a big improvement for vm land. a database that
just kills storage takes a noticable hit on cpu to virtualize. you can
use a nas or other methods to mitigate much of it but if direct storage
is needed wo latency and cpu hit direct hardware is needed. for games
to play on a windows guest it has to have hardware 3d and some apps
require 2/3d hardware acceleration to run now to. assigning the
videocard or say the 2nd video out to a vm directly you can now use
hardware acceleration with a standard windows video driver at full
speed. stuff like 3dsmax and autocad can be used in a windows guest
aslong as you either crack the dongle or have a version that does not
require that kind of copy protection. it may be possible to also assign
the paral port to the guest as well and solve that issue. I do know
that copy protection is tempramental even when used as directed...
