Xen Developer Summit 2015

The upcoming Xen release will add support for ARM device assignment.

Device passthrough allows the user to give control of physical devices (NIC, graphic card, GPS, etc) to a virtual machine, giving it full and direct access to the device. This has several potential uses, including avoiding overhead of the device para-virtualization.

On ARM based SOCs, most devices (NIC, graphic card, etc) are directly integrated on the SOC and not discoverable. This make passthrough less intuitive than with PCI devices.

During this session we will explain what is the approach taken and show the different steps to passthrough an integrated device. We will also discuss possible improvements for a more generic solution.