Add support for Windows VM?!

[oscarbg]

Hi I'm no expert on VM but have some suggestions/questions to the project: 1) I see on presentation you say no IHV has tried to use SR-IOV but then what technology uses Nvidia in his Kepler cards that it calls they support true HW GPU virtualization and having support only right now on Citrix platform.. is SR-IOV or similar to yours? 2) for me the most important use of it is if you can support Windows as guest.. my recomendation is that you should work with Intel Windows graphics driver team so that we can apply this model to Windows guest machines also.. that would be awesome.. 3) do you expect some serious issues if testing say with latest ubuntu releases like 13.10 or upcoming 14.04 beta? 4) Currently is Haswell graphics but I assume from that all Intel processors will be supported like Broadwell, right? 5) You said in september code drop in xengt setup guide had experimental HW video decode accel support.. "HW-accelerated Video Playback Preliminary Supported" but now I can't see that in the february guide.. has it support been removed? also you don't say if also we can access HW accel video encoding via libva Intel driver also or even if it's compatible with new Intel Media SDK for Linux which leverages that.. can you answer that? 6) also OpenCL on Intel GPUs for Linux platforms is coming via beignet project.. can also expect support for that? or it is already supported?

[dcui]

Thank you for inquiring about our work to improve the virtualization experience. We look forward to delivering a product which supports hardware, operating systems and features of today and future technologies. More details will be communicated so please continuing monitoring this site for our next update.

It's our understanding that there are no SR-IOV implementations in the market for GPU today.

We actively extending support for other Operating Systems and future HW platforms in XenGT. Please stay tuned for future updates.

It should be easy to switch from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04(or newer).

There was no changes to Media acceleration support in this update(we just need full tests).

We now focus on HSW, and yes, future HWs will be supported too.

We have not tested OpenCL for Linux on XenGT.

[oscarbg]

Hi, thanks for details..

I have just seen Usenix ATC paper which renames work to Gvirt and seems Windows driver already has support for it " because the Windows driver we received from the production group has already implemented the virtualization extension, without an option to turn off the trap optimization. For 3DMark06 and Heaven3D, gVirt achieves 83% and 81% of native performance, respectively, which are very close to the VT-d performance (85% and 87% of native performance). In PassMark2D, gVirt achieves 76% of native performance, better than that of the Linux 2D workload" Will you post instructions on how to obtain such a driver and host to run a Windows VM using it, soon?

I also see Android support coming to XenGT via ConsoleSO kickstarter project:

"InstaSwitch will leverage cutting-edge XenGT technology. It's the one feature that we know will be the most challenging, but will eventually deliver instant toggling between native Android, and other operating systems. Imagine editing a document in Microsoft Office®, playing Half-Life 3™ in SteamOS™, and reviewing your Gmail™ inside Android... all from the same tablet or gaming rig."

Overall very good news..

[l1viathan]

Hi Oscar, Thanks for your comments.

The windows driver is now available, and you can find the detailed setup guide here:

https://github.com/01org/XenGT-Preview-kernel/blob/master/XenGT_Setup_Guide.pdf