[openstack-dev] Instance with access to GPU, libvirt and hostdev

Guillaume Thouvenin guillaume.thouvenin at bull.net
Tue Apr 9 09:12:45 UTC 2013


Hello,

  Here is my use case. I have a machine with GPU and I want to provide 
an instance that can start an X server and use the GPU to allow 3D 
rendering.

  The BIOS installed on my machine doesn't allow IOMMU. So the solution 
I see is to use a compute node with the Linux container driver.

  To be able to start an X server in a container and to use GPU 
(available through /dev/nvidiaX on my machine) with virtualGL for 
example I need to attach some PCI devices (/dev/ttyX and /dev/nvidiaY) 
to the guest. To achieve this I'm using the "hostdev" element in the XML 
configuration file of the container.

  I looked in the code of nova/virt/libvirt/config.py that generates the 
XML file for instance and I didn't see any "hostdev" element [1]. So it 
seems that currently this feature (ie attached PCI devices from the host 
to the guest using the hostdev element) is not yet supported.

  As I'm new to openstack I'd like to ask if it makes sense to propose a 
blueprint to add this feature.


Regards,
Guillaume

[1] http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsHostDev


-- 
Guillaume Thouvenin                  Software Engineer
Bull, Architect of an Open World     http://www.bull.com
Phone: + 33 4 76 29 75 36



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