What is VFIO PCI?
What is VFIO PCI?
The VFIO driver is an IOMMU/device agnostic framework for exposing direct device access to userspace, in a secure, IOMMU protected environment. In other words, this allows safe 2, non-privileged, userspace drivers.
What is VFIO passthrough?
Virtual Function I/O (or VFIO) allows a virtual machine (VM) direct access to a pci hardware resource, such as a graphics processing unit (GPU). Virtual machines with set up GPU passthrough can gain close to bare metal performance, which makes running games in a Windows virtual machine possible.
What is libvirt used for?
libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.
What is VFIO container?
A container is created by simply opening the /dev/vfio/vfio character device. On its own, the container provides little functionality, with all but a couple version and extension query interfaces locked away. The user needs to add a group into the container for the next level of functionality.
How do I bind VFIO PCI?
vfio-pci-bind
- If both Vendor:Device and Domain:Bus:Device.Function were provided, validate that the requested Vendor:Device exists at Domain:Bus:Device.Function.
- Unbinds all devices that are in the same iommu group as the supplied device from their current driver (except PCIe bridges).
- Binds to vfio-pci:
What is PCI passthrough?
The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) passthrough feature enables you to access and manage hardware devices from a virtual machine. When PCI passthrough is configured, the PCI devices function as if they were physically attached to the guest operating system.
What is difference between KVM and QEMU?
So to conclude: QEMU is a type 2 hypervisor that runs within user space and performs virtual hardware emulation, whereas KVM is a type 1 hypervisor that runs in kernel space, that allows a user space program access to the hardware virtualization features of various processors.
What is VirtIO driver?
VirtIO Drivers are paravirtualized drivers for kvm/Linux (see http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Virtio). In short, they enable direct (paravirtualized) access to devices and peripherals for virtual machines using them, instead of slower, emulated, ones.
