Virtualising PCI

Authors

Myrto Zehnder and Peter Chubb

NICTA, Sydney, Australia
UNSW, Australia

Abstract

UNSW has been working for some time both on user-level drivers and a framework for using Linux as a hypervisor. These separate projects have been reported on in previous Gelato conferences.

Given that we have a way to run a complete Linux image in userspace on top of Linux, it would seem desirable to allow access to a subset of the PCI bus from a guest operating system. This would allow:

• A virtual machine to be given exclusive access to devices on the PCI bus.
• Easier device driver development

Myrto Zehnder, a Master's student from ETH Zurich, has been working with Gelato@UNSW for the past six months on allowing controlled access to the device-driver framework in the guest. This talk will present the mechanisms we have developed, and the pitfalls we have encountered in implementing the system.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Zehnder_Chubb_06,
    author           = {Myrto Zehnder and Peter Chubb},
    title            = {Virtualising {PCI}},
    month            = oct,
    year             = {2006},
    booktitle        = {Gelato ICE},
    address          = {Singapore}
  }

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