Ongoing MediaPortal TVService on virtualized Windows XP (1 Viewer)

[Diggen]

I have also seen these MoBos, the bad thing all are mATX. Linux is no problem, too
The Problem on my site is that all my servers are AMD Based. So no IOMMU until 2009?
I allready read the Xen Mailinglists in my freetime, but in lack of time and money...
Another idea was to use USB Recievers, but the costs would be the same with the downside that it look some kind of dirty and I haven't heard a succes report.

Thanks for the succes report. It woud be nice if you report of the up- and downsides after testing a little bit ;

 

[stoked]

AMD hasn't released IOMMU yet. I guess they got enough on their plate trying to play catchup to Intel with their cpu's. I was considering going USB controllers but decided against it as I hear USB DVB tuners are spotty. I put my P5E-VM board into a huge full tower ATX case, mATX fits ATX mounting layout, not sure what the downside is there.

So far my setup is working just as well as my old native windows tvserver installations. I am seeing odd send UDP performance with the GPL PV Windows drivers however. TCP (850Mbit) and UDP (200Mbit) receive performance on gigabit (w/o jumbo frames) is very good. I have engaged the author of the drivers regarding this. However, even with poor UDP performance, a single RTSP stream is not a problem. I allocated 512MB of RAM and only 1 core to the Windows DomU, memory usage when streaming is around 400MB and cpu usage is negligible.

 

[Diggen]

I had time and money. Ok not really time but money and bought some hardware. A Asus P5e-VM DO and an E8200.
I have tried to install CentOs 5.1 but is hangs at udev on starting. I think it is the IDE Drive that cause the problem. Tommorow I will try to split my old RAID and use one SATA HD for the install. Or are there any Tips?

 

[stoked]

I had time and money. Ok not really time but money and bought some hardware. A Asus P5e-VM DO and an E8200.
I have tried to install CentOs 5.1 but is hangs at udev on starting. I think it is the IDE Drive that cause the problem. Tommorow I will try to split my old RAID and use one SATA HD for the install. Or are there any Tips?

I never had that problem, but I didn't install my CentOS OS on my RAID partition, it's on a single SATA drive.

 

[Diggen]

Havn't split my RAID yet but found some SATA-Drive in another Computer After thinkering 3-4 hours more around with CentOS and other Distribution I found out not the HDD respectively the IDE-SATA bridge cause the problems, one of my TV-Cards is the blacksheep ;(.
Today I will setup a minimal CentOS and Xen-3.2.1 from source as per User.pdf.

Should I get the complete xen-unstable.hg or only the 3.2.1 tarball ? and have you found any good documentation for CentOS 5.1 and Xen-3.2.1 ?

Thanks for your Help

PS.you are right either the Hardware is easy supported or Xen in most Dsstribution.

 

[stoked]

I should have blogged it or written it down somewhere. I think the biggest gotcha I had for Xen on CentOS was DO NOT install from the packaged ones from the distribution. Compile xen from xen-unstable.hg not the tarball. I'm often on the #xen or #mediaportal irc channels on freenode, but probaby won't be much this week. Otherwise, I'll try and reply in this thread.

BTW, I was running into a CPU throttling issue where CPU usage would range from 50-100% usage while streaming HDTV. CPU-Z and other cpu apps showed the CPU constantly switching between 6x and 9x mulitplier. I had to disable SpeedStep and C1E in the Bios before it would stay at 9X. Actually I also hardcoded my CPU multiplier so it may be one or a combination of those things. CPU utilization is now peaking at 19% when streaming HDTV. Hope it saves you some time =D, I was banging my head on that one.

PS. The GPL PV drivers unfortunately hide all PCI devices on the same bus as the Realtek virtual nic. My Skystar2 is a Network Device according to windows and is therefore disabled when installing the GPL PV drivers. The author's deciding how to approach this problem but will likely make an exclusion config file so VT-d users can ensure their devices are not disabled.

 

[Diggen]

Xen is working now (installed Windows flawlessly), but PCI-passthrough not. It shows Vt-d enables, pci.back is added to grub, pci to config, xm pci-list show they are attached to my domain and dmesg has no errors but it won't work. Maybe because of my adventure of Installing Xen-3.3-unstable
I have more or less written down the steps and ordered them and if you know how it isn't that complicated.

do a minimal install
firewall and selinux off
static IP
/dev/sda1 - 9G - ext3 - /
/dev/sda2 - 1G - swap - swap
/dev/sda1 - rest - lvm -


yum update
yum install binutils
yum install gcc
yum install dev86
yum install zlib-devel python-devel libX11-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel pciutils-devel glibc-devel


(maybe latex? for docs)


wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/mercurial/mercurial-0.9.5-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm --install mercurial-0.9.5-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

mkdir /usr/src/xen
cd /usr/src/xen

hg init
hg pull xen-unstable: changelog
hg update

make world
make install

3 ) make linux-2.6-xen-config CONFIGMODE=menuconfig
4 ) change XEN->"PCI-device backend driver" from "M" to "*".
5 ) make linux-2.6-xen-build
6 ) make linux-2.6-xen-install
7 ) depmod 2.6.18.8-xen
8 ) mkinitrd -v -f --with=ahci --with=sd_mod --with=scsi_mod initrd-2.6.18-xen.img 2.6.18.8-xen
9 ) cp initrd-2.6.18-xen.img /boot
10) lspci - select the PCI BDF you want to assign to guest OS
11) "hide" pci device from dom0 as following sample grub entry:
title Xen-Fedora Core (2.6.18-xen)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/xen.gz vtd=1
module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-xen root=LABEL=/ ro pciback.hide=(012:00.0)
module /boot/initrd-2.6.18-xen.img

download e1000e driver
SourceForge.net: Intel(R) PRO/10/100/1000/10GbE Drivers


reboot to xen

compile e1000e driver

reboot

I will check if I missed something and eventually maybe I'am going to reinstall

 

[stoked]

You got pci= [ '012:00.0' ] in your domU config file?

 

[Diggen]

Ok I'am done with Xen, I need my HTPC back (and my Family all the other things)

After reinstall of Centos and Xen PCI-passthrough works, but my Cinergy 1200 installs the Driver but can't start the Tuner (Coder: 10) and my Twinhan 1025 don't install at all. I looks like the passedthrough Twinhan has the wrong Subsys String in Windows ? At the other side a passedhrough Network cards works.
Probably you had succses becaus of the Skystar shows as a Networkcard? btw Is ist a Sykstar 2 or Skystar HD 2? Maybe I get some Skystar in the next Weeks, its time for HDTV.

All in all it was a nice expirence and I will try it again later with a new Xen Version
But now i install a WinXP Host with MP and Vmware guests.

Thanks for your Help

EDIT:
Forgot to say 12 was a Typo and yes I added it

Edit seems to be broken ?

This is the way how it worked (more or less)

ASUS P5E VM DO
--------------
Update to Bios 702
Enable Intel VT-d in Bios

Boot Centos 5.1 Netinst
do a minimal install (deselect all - custom deselect all)
firewall and selinux off
static IP
/dev/sda1 - 9G - ext3 - /
/dev/sda2 - 1G - swap - swap
/dev/sda1 - rest - lvm - 


yum update 
yum install bridge-utils
yum install gcc autoconf automake dev86
yum install \
binutils-devel glibc-devel zlib-devel \
python-devel libX11-devel openssl-devel \
ncurses-devel pciutils-devel curl-devel \
libxml2-devel kernel-devel

(latex? for docs)

wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/mercurial/mercurial-0.9.5-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm --install mercurial-0.9.5-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

mkdir /usr/src/xen
cd /usr/src/xen

hg init
hg pull http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg
(hg pull http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.2-testing.hg)
hg update

make install-xen
make install-tools

make linux-2.6-xen-config CONFIGMODE=menuconfig

change XEN->"PCI-device backend driver" from "M" to "*".
/*
disable unnecessery things ?
v4l, dvb-Dev
e1000*, r8169 
*/

make linux-2.6-xen-build
make linux-2.6-xen-install
depmod 2.6.18.8-xen
mkinitrd -v -f --with=ahci --with=sd_mod --with=scsi_mod initrd-2.6.18-xen.img 2.6.18.8-xen
mv initrd-2.6.18-xen.img /boot

lspci - select the PCI BDF you want to assign to guest OS
hide pci device from dom0 as following sample grub entry:

Edit grub
"
title Xen-3.2-testing (2.6.18.8-xen)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/xen.gz vtd=1
        module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-xen root=/dev/sda1 ro pciback.hide=(02:00.0)(03:01.0)
        module /boot/initrd-2.6.18-xen.img
"

download e1000e driver
http://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000


reboot to xen

compile e1000e driver

add "alias eth0 e1000e" to /etc/modprobe.conf
chkconfig --add xend

reboot

 

[stoked]

I got a regular Skystar2. I also have a Twinhan 102G that was working fine in native windows. I haven't had a chance to drop that card into my xen server yet.