PCIBACK(4) | Device Drivers Manual (xen) | PCIBACK(4) |
pciback
— Xen
backend paravirtualized PCI pass-through driver
pciback* at pci?
The pciback
driver is the backend part of
the PCI pass-through functionality that can be used by the Xen dom0 to
export pci(4) devices to a guest
domain. To export a PCI device to a guest domain, the device has to be
attached to pciback
in the dom0.
When the guest domain is NetBSD, the
device attached to the pciback
driver will attach to
a xpci(4) bus inside the guest
domain.
To attach a device to the pciback
driver,
follow these steps:
pciback
, in bus:device.function notation. The list
is passed to dom0 module via the pciback.hide
parameter:
pciback.hide=(bus:dev.fun)(bus:dev.func)(...)
pci = ['bus:dev.fun',
'...']
The pciback
driver first appeared in
NetBSD 5.1.
The pciback
driver was written by
Manuel Bouyer
<bouyer@NetBSD.org>.
Currently, to attach a device to the
pciback
backend, this procedure has to be performed
at boot(8) time. In the future,
it will be possible to do it without requiring a dom0 reboot.
As PCI passthrough offers the possibility for guest domains to send arbitrary PCI commands to a physical device, this has direct impact on the overall stability and security of the system. For example, in case of erroneous or malicious commands, the device could overwrite physical memory portions, via DMA.
January 8, 2011 | NetBSD 10.99 |