Hi all. Disclaimer: I'm quite new to things like virtual machines, and even half-baked when it comes to QEMU. I'm aware that my idea might be absurd, but still it's worth a try :)
I'm wondering if it would be possible to modify QEMU such that VMs could access PCI devices on the host system. And, if it would be possible at all, how much work this would be. Background: I'm one of the developers of MadWifi, which is a linux driver for WLAN cards based on Atheros chipsets. QEMU could be a great help in testing distribution-specific issues, as well as issues related to SMP operation. The only downside is that it's not easily possible to emulate the necessary WLAN hardware. Now, if it would be possible to allow a VM to access physical PCI devices on the host, it could make use of non-emulated hardware for this purpose. Even more, thanks to the SMP emulation that recently went into QEMU, it would be possible to test the compatibility of the driver with SMP systems, even if the host is just a UP system. I vaguely heard of a feature present in Xen, which allows to assign PCI devices to one of the guests. I understand Xen works different than QEMU, but maybe is would be possible to implement something similar. Any comments appreciated, thanks in advance. Bye, Mike _______________________________________________ Qemu-devel mailing list Qemu-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
