F15 kernel Xen support missing PCI passthrough?

[Hilton Day]

After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and 
includes pvops, 5 years after my last post on Fedora-Xen, I'm back.  
I've been running Xen on a home server for well, just over 5 years, the 
last three of which have been on a Centos5 dom0, in the absence of dom0 
support in Fedora since FC6.

I've installed a fresh machine, and can get a dom0 running in Fedora 15 
using 2.6.40 and the default xen-4.1.1 packages, as well as DomU's 
running Centos5, Scientific Linux 6, Fedora 15 and Solaris 11, so all 
good there.

But I've hit a snag.  The Fedora kernel doesn't appear to include the 
xen-pciback kernel module (or indeed any module with "pciback" in its 
name).  I use PCI Passthrough to donate a physical NIC to one of the 
domU's which runs the network gateway/firewall/transparent proxy etc. 
for the network.

I've grabbed the kernel source rpm and checked out the config files, and 
they appear to be completely missing the XEN_PCIDEV_BACKEND flags.

Being new to Fedora 15, Kernel 3 and Xen4.x all at once, is there some 
new trick that isn't documented online, or am I right in seeing a lack 
of PCI pass-through support in the Fedora kernel?

My next step is to try adding the compile flags to the .config and 
rebuilding the kernel - but would appreciate anyone's input with more 
experience of the Fedora environment.

Thanks,

Hilton.

[Jerry Amundson]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton Day <xlot(a)onlinewarrior.com&gt; wrote:
>  After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise,
> and 
Quoting http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0
"
Current status

    Targeted release: Fedora 16
    Last updated: 2010-07-24
    Percentage of completion: 75%

In order to implement this feature, it is necessary to get full Xen
Dom0 support upstream and in Fedora. The core Dom0 support has been
accepted upstream and was released in Linux 2.6.37. Linux 2.6.39
brought support for the Xen network backend driver. Linux 3.0 brought
the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver
(for pci passthru).
"

hth,
jerry

[Hilton Day]

On 25/08/2011 12:47 PM, Jerry Amundson wrote:
>  On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton
> Day<xlot(a)onlinewarrior.com>  wrote:
> > After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and
>  the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver
>  (for pci passthru).
>  
Thanks Jerry - I saw the page but missed the comment on "passthru", so 
as usual RTFM saves the day.

Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test build 
for replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.

I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its 
progress with interest.  Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it 
into F16.  I was already running libvirt-0.9.0.f16 on my F15 box 
(rebuilt from SRPM), and if pciback makes it into 3.1 in time, F16 will 
finally be the killer (supported) dom0 solution I've been waiting for 
since FC6.

Cheers,

Hilton.
-Sydney, Oz.

[Jerry Amundson]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 11:16 PM, Hilton Day <xlot(a)onlinewarrior.com&gt; wrote:
>  On 25/08/2011 12:47 PM, Jerry Amundson wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton Day&lt;xlot(a)onlinewarrior.com&gt;
> >  wrote:
> >>
> >> After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and
> >
> > the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver
> > (for pci passthru).
> >
>
>  Thanks Jerry - I saw the page but missed the comment on "passthru", so as
>  usual RTFM saves the day.
>
>  Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test build for
>  replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.
>
>  I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its progress
>  with interest.  Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it into F16.  I
>  was already running libvirt-0.9.0.f16 on my F15 box (rebuilt from SRPM), and
>  if pciback makes it into 3.1 in time, F16 will finally be the killer
>  (supported) dom0 solution I've been waiting for since FC6. 
Amen to that. I don't know if the problems were political or technical
or both, but Xen really got screwed from our point of view. The
majority of hardware on Earth is currently *not* capable of full
virtualization, but commit to it anyway. Hmm.

jerry

[M A Young]

On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Hilton Day wrote:

>  Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test
> build
>  for replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.
>
>  I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its
>  progress with interest.  Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it
>  into F16. 
It has already reached F16. There is also talk of an F15 2.6.41 kernel 
once 3.1 has proved itself in F16.

 	Michael Young

[Boris Derzhavets]

>  It has already reached F16. There is also talk of an F15 2.6.41
> kernel 
>  once 3.1 has proved itself in F16. 
Do you mean "yum update" installs 3.1.0-rc3 (?) on F16 ?
3.0 doesn't have pci-backend.

Boris.

--- On Thu, 8/25/11, M A Young <m.a.young(a)durham.ac.uk&gt; wrote:

From: M A Young <m.a.young(a)durham.ac.uk&gt;
Subject: Re: [Fedora-xen] F15 kernel Xen support missing PCI passthrough?
To: "Hilton Day" <xlot(a)onlinewarrior.com&gt;
Cc: xen(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Date: Thursday, August 25, 2011, 4:25 AM

On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Hilton Day wrote:

>  Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test
> build
>  for replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.
>
>  I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its
>  progress with interest.  Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it
>  into F16. 
It has already reached F16. There is also talk of an F15 2.6.41 kernel 
once 3.1 has proved itself in F16.

     Michael Young
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[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 02:16:30PM +1000, Hilton Day wrote:
>  On 25/08/2011 12:47 PM, Jerry Amundson wrote:
>  > On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton Day<xlot(a)onlinewarrior.com>  wrote:
>  >> After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and
>  > the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver
>  > (for pci passthru).
>  >
>  
>  Thanks Jerry - I saw the page but missed the comment on "passthru", so 
>  as usual RTFM saves the day.
>   
It's also good to monitor the "upstream" Xen pvops status page at:
http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps

-- Pasi