[fedora-virt] Support for modems and other such physical hardware?

[Greg Scott]

Ideally, I'd like to do this one with virt-manager on RHEL.  Or Fedora.  Maybe eventually on RHEV.  If I do this, it would be new hardware - not sure if those Brooktrout modems are PCI-e or just PCI.

- Greg



-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Williamson [mailto:alex.williamson at redhat.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 11:56 AM
To: Eric Blake
Cc: Greg Scott; virt at lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: Re: [fedora-virt] Support for modems and other such physical hardware?

On Fri, 2012-06-15 at 10:38 -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 06/15/2012 10:02 AM, Greg Scott wrote:
> > Hi have a situation with a Windows 2003 server that uses a fax modem.
> > I'd love to P2V this server but I need support for a Brooktrout 
> > faxmodem.  The idea is, just pass anything to/from this hardware 
> > directly to the Windows guest VM, so the guest VM "thinks" it's 
> > connected to the faxmodem.  I haven't run across anything that says 
> > I can do that with KVM virtual machines.  Any ideas?
> 
> With new enough hardware, or if you don't mind the security risks with 
> older hardware where iommu was incomplete and could allow a malicious 
> guest to take over the host,

iommu is a requirement for PCI assignment, any partial support for iommu-less operation has been disabled as it never worked upstream and presented a security hole.  Google guesses this is a PCI device, so you'll need a system with VT-d or AMD-Vi (if it's indeed a legacy PCI device vs a PCI-e device, it's often easier to make those work on VT-d).
Thanks,

Alex