|
I said I shouldn't be messing up with qemu-amithlon, at least not for now, and I am not. I am just bringing up an idea that could, theoretically speaking (but we have so many examples that it is not just backed up by theory) open new way of running Amithlon. Qemu is just great and I am impressed with all its features. Exploring it recently, I came across a feature and had an idea to use it for Amithlon. Its been out for quite some time and I see new opportunity for amithlon users with it, IOMMU, PCI passthrough, and its implemented in Qemu, VBox, etc. Our only problem for all this time was the graphics, generally speaking. Amithlon requires real hardware, video card, real registers for hw acceleration. Any other component we can easily emulate, sound, controllers, and so on, all but the graphics. This way we can build and run (hopefully, as it is still an idea to be worked out) on any modern hardware having fast cpu. All we need to have is another, pci video card, that is nicely supported in Amithlon. What do you guys think about this?
For those who don't know what pci passthrough is, it is a feature which allows a pci device on a bus to be passed to a guest OS with all its features and possibilities. Guest system has full control of a device like it was present in it. Think of it like this, FX5500 PCI passed to Amithlon and 'it is' fully in control of amithlon. There are small adapters pci-x 2 pci, with one or more pci slots. The steps to achieve this are not that hard and there are lots of howtos. In simple words a device we wish to pass through is found by the host kernel but not initialized (the system doesn't take control over it, loads driver ..) instead it is assigned to another layer. From that layer and using Qemu for example we pass it to our guest os which has exclusive access to it. That is why we need to configure device, load iommu module, prevent guest os from taking over the device, and finally pass it to guest os. Sounds interesting ??
Best regards!
|