Chapter 12. PCI Device Assignment Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 exposes three classes of device to its virtual machines: Emulated devices are purely virtual devices that mimic real hardware, allowing unmodified guest operating systems to work with them using their standard in-box drivers. Virtio devices are purely virtual devices designed to work optimally in a virtual machine. Virtio devices are similar to emulated devices, however, non-Linux virtual machines do not include the drivers they require by default. Virtualization management software like the Virtual Machine Manager ( virt-manager ) and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor install these drivers automatically for supported non-Linux guest operating systems. Assigned devices are physical devices that are exposed to the virtual machine. This method is also known as 'passthrough'. Device assignment allows virtual machines exclusive access to PCI devices for a range of tasks, and allows PCI devices to appear and behave as if they were physically attached to the guest operating system. Device assignment is supported on PCI Express devices, except graphics cards. Parallel PCI devices may be supported as assigned devices, but they have severe limitations due to security and system configuration conflicts. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 supports 32 PCI device slots per virtual machine, and 8 PCI functions per device slot. This gives a theoretical maximum of 256 configurable PCI functions per guest. However, this theoretical maximum is subject to the following limitations: Each virtual machine supports a maximum of 8 assigned device functions. 4 PCI device slots are configured with 5 emulated devices (two devices are in slot 1) by default. However, users can explicitly remove 2 of the emulated devices that are configured by default if the guest operating system does not require them for operation (the video adapter device in slot 2; and the memory balloon driver device in the lowest available slot, usually slot 3). This gives users a supported functional maximum of 30 PCI device slots per virtual machine. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and newer supports hot plugging assigned PCI devices into virtual machines. However, PCI device hot plugging operates at the slot level and therefore does not support multi-function PCI devices. Multi-function PCI devices are recommended for static device configuration only. Note Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 limited guest operating system driver access to a device's standard and extended configuration space. Limitations that were present in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 were significantly reduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, and enable a much larger set of PCI Express devices to be successfully assigned to KVM guests. Secure device assignment also requires interrupt remapping support. If a platform does not support interrupt remapping, device assignment will fail. To use device assignment without interrupt remapping support in a development environment, set the allow_unsafe_assigned_interrupts KVM module parameter to 1 . PCI device assignment is only available on hardware platforms supporting either Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU. These Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU specifications must be enabled in BIOS for PCI device assignment to function. Procedure 12.1. Preparing an Intel system for PCI device assignment Enable the Intel VT-d specifications The Intel VT-d specifications provide hardware support for directly assigning a physical device to a virtual machine. These specifications are required to use PCI device assignment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Intel VT-d specifications must be enabled in the BIOS. Some system manufacturers disable these specifications by default. The terms used to refer to these specifications can differ between manufacturers; consult your system manufacturer's documentation for the appropriate terms. Activate Intel VT-d in the kernel Activate Intel VT-d in the kernel by adding the intel_iommu=on parameter to the kernel line in the /boot/grub/grub.conf file. The example below is a modified grub.conf file with Intel VT-d activated. Ready to use Reboot the system to enable the changes. Your system is now capable of PCI device assignment. Procedure 12.2. Preparing an AMD system for PCI device assignment Enable the AMD IOMMU specifications The AMD IOMMU specifications are required to use PCI device assignment in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These specifications must be enabled in the BIOS. Some system manufacturers disable these specifications by default. Enable IOMMU kernel support Append amd_iommu=on to the kernel command line in /boot/grub/grub.conf so that AMD IOMMU specifications are enabled at boot. Ready to use Reboot the system to enable the changes. Your system is now capable of PCI device assignment. 12.1. Assigning a PCI Device with virsh These steps cover assigning a PCI device to a virtual machine on a KVM hypervisor. This example uses a PCIe network controller with the PCI identifier code, pci_0000_01_00_0 , and a fully virtualized guest machine named guest1-rhel6-64 . Procedure 12.3. Assigning a PCI device to a guest virtual machine with virsh Identify the device First, identify the PCI device designated for device assignment to the virtual machine. Use the lspci command to list the available PCI devices. You can refine the output of lspci with grep . This example uses the Ethernet controller highlighted in the following output: This Ethernet controller is shown with the short identifier 00:19.0 . We need to find out the full identifier used by virsh in order to assign this PCI device to a virtual machine. To do so, combine the virsh nodedev-list command with the grep command to list all devices of a particular type ( pci ) that are attached to the host machine. Then look at the output for the string that maps to the short identifier of the device you wish to use. This example highlights the string that maps to the Ethernet controller with the short identifier 00:19.0 . Note that the : and . characters are replaced with underscores in the full identifier. Record the PCI device number that maps to the device you want to use; this is required in other steps. Review device information Information on the domain, bus, and function are available from output of the virsh nodedev-dumpxml command: Determine required configuration details Refer to the output from the virsh nodedev-dumpxml pci_0000_00_19_0 command for the values required for the configuration file. Optionally, convert slot and function values to hexadecimal values (from decimal) to get the PCI bus addresses. Append "0x" to the beginning of the output to tell the computer that the value is a hexadecimal number. The example device has the following values: bus = 0, slot = 25 and function = 0. The decimal configuration uses those three values: If you want to convert to hexadecimal values, you can use the printf utility to convert from decimal values, as shown in the following example: The example device would use the following hexadecimal values in the configuration file: Add configuration details Run virsh edit , specifying the virtual machine name, and add a device entry in the <source> section to assign the PCI device to the guest virtual machine. Alternately, run virsh attach-device , specifying the virtual machine name and the guest's XML file: Allow device management Set an SELinux boolean to allow the management of the PCI device from the virtual machine: Start the virtual machine The PCI device should now be successfully assigned to the virtual machine, and accessible to the guest operating system.

Commands:
default=0 timeout=5 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz hiddenmenu title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.32-330.x86_645) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-330.x86_64 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet intel_iommu=on initrd /initrd-2.6.32-330.x86_64.img
lspci | grep Ethernet 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82567LM-2 Gigabit Network Connection 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82576 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01) 01:00.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82576 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)
virsh nodedev-list --cap pci pci_0000_00_00_0 pci_0000_00_01_0 pci_0000_00_03_0 pci_0000_00_07_0 pci_0000_00_10_0 pci_0000_00_10_1 pci_0000_00_14_0 pci_0000_00_14_1 pci_0000_00_14_2 pci_0000_00_14_3 pci_0000_ 00_19_0 pci_0000_00_1a_0 pci_0000_00_1a_1 pci_0000_00_1a_2 pci_0000_00_1a_7 pci_0000_00_1b_0 pci_0000_00_1c_0 pci_0000_00_1c_1 pci_0000_00_1c_4 pci_0000_00_1d_0 pci_0000_00_1d_1 pci_0000_00_1d_2 pci_0000_00_1d_7 pci_0000_00_1e_0 pci_0000_00_1f_0 pci_0000_00_1f_2 pci_0000_00_1f_3 pci_0000_01_00_0 pci_0000_01_00_1 pci_0000_02_00_0 pci_0000_02_00_1 pci_0000_06_00_0 pci_0000_07_02_0 pci_0000_07_03_0
virsh nodedev-dumpxml pci_0000_00_19_0 <device> <name>pci_0000_00_19_0</name> <parent>computer</parent> <driver> <name>e1000e</name> </driver> <capability type='pci'> <domain>0</domain> <bus>0</bus> <slot>25</slot> <function>0</function> <product id='0x1502'>82579LM Gigabit Network Connection</product> <vendor id='0x8086'>Intel Corporation</vendor> <capability type='virt_functions'> </capability> </capability> </device>
bus='0' slot='25' function='0'
printf %x 0 0 printf %x 25 19 printf %x 0 0
bus='0x0' slot='0x19' function='0x0'
virsh edit guest1-rhel6-64 <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'> <source> <address domain='0x0' bus='0x0' slot='0x19' function='0x0'/> </source> </hostdev>
virsh attach-device guest1-rhel6-64 file.xml
setsebool -P virt_use_sysfs 1
virsh start guest1-rhel6-64