PCI-passthrough on AMD - OpenVox A400P

Hi all!

I've a cluster (active/passive) with two KVM VM with Asterisk and Pacemaker+Corosync. I wonder if anyone tried to use a OpenVox A400P card from a virtual machine.

My idea is to have both nodes accessing this card. I don't know if it is possible, I wish that in this scenario when a node is accessing the card, the other don't use it.

Of course this is a scenario for testing, but I wonder if I can do this kind of configuration on the cluster over virtual machines.

Hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS M2N32-SLI DELUXE ACPI BIOS Revision 0706
Processor:   AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+

The hardware seems to support IOMMU, but it is not enabled:

# dmesg | grep -i iommu
[    0.000000] Please enable the IOMMU option in the BIOS setup
[    0.654618] PCI-DMA: using GART IOMMU.
[    0.654623] PCI-DMA: Reserving 64MB of IOMMU area in the AGP aperture

Software versions:

# uname -a
Linux ss01 2.6.39-bpo.2-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Aug 4 11:42:06 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

# kvm --version
QEMU emulator version 1.1.2 (qemu-kvm-1.1.2+dfsg-5~bpo60+1, Debian), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Regards,
Daniel

Daniel Bareiro - System Administrator
Fingerprint: BFB3 08D6 B4D1 31B2 72B9  29CE 6696 BF1B 14E6 1D37
Powered by Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze - Linux user #188.598

AFAIK, Athlon64 does not support AMD-Vi, which is the IOMMU support you'd need. PCI passthrough also only works for VMs running on the same system where the card is installed, and doesn't offer multiplexing of a single device. Thanks,

Alex

Hi, Alex.

I will investigate this issue and then tell you.

The two cluster nodes are running on the same host. On the issue of multiplexing, was mostly a curiosity. For testing, I do not care to have to manually link and unlink the PCI device.

Moreover, is having a problem with the mailing list? For some time I did not write and since I was not receiving emails from October last year, I signed up again with the same account that I was using before; but since 9 April that I do not receive emails from the list.

Interestingly I got your reply but did not get the email I sent to the list. Today I wrote an email to the Pacemaker list with the same account I used to sign up here, and I received it with no problems.

Thanks for your reply.

Regards,
Daniel

Daniel Bareiro - System Administrator
Fingerprint: BFB3 08D6 B4D1 31B2 72B9  29CE 6696 BF1B 14E6 1D37
Powered by Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze - Linux user #188.598

Well... I was looking if BIOS options of the motherboad (M2N32 SLI Deluxe) had some reference to IOMMU, but I found nothing.

According to a post [1] I read on the list, I tried the option amd_iommu=on, obtaining the following in the log:

# dmesg | grep -i iommu
[    0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.39-bpo.2-amd64 root=UUID=084f271f-0d70-40d2-9c22-c38848cd4d82 ro amd_iommu=on quiet
[    0.000000] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.39-bpo.2-amd64 root=UUID=084f271f-0d70-40d2-9c22-c38848cd4d82 ro amd_iommu=on quiet
[    0.000000] Please enable the IOMMU option in the BIOS setup
[    0.654633] PCI-DMA: using GART IOMMU.
[    0.654638] PCI-DMA: Reserving 64MB of IOMMU area in the AGP aperture

For the message "Please enable the IOMMU option in the BIOS setup", it seems that IOMMU is still not enabled. So maybe you were right in what you said before.

Regards,
Daniel

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg65714.html

Daniel Bareiro - System Administrator
Fingerprint: BFB3 08D6 B4D1 31B2 72B9  29CE 6696 BF1B 14E6 1D37
Powered by Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze - Linux user #188.598