[mythtv-users] VMWare on the backend. Viable solution?

Kenni Lund kenni at kelu.dk
Mon Jan 11 20:06:40 UTC 2010


2010/1/11 Jeppe Nejsum Madsen <jeppe at ingolfs.dk>:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Martin Ravell
> <martin.ravell at rave-tech.com.au> wrote:
>> What do you think? Is VMWare with MythBackend on a (probably Fedora or
>> CentOS) virtual machine a viable option? I may add some more front-ends as
>> well but at this stage it will be one of each.
>
> Performance wise it should be fine, but I don't think you can use your
> TV card in the VM?
>
> AFAIK, Xen is the only virtualization technology that allows pci pass
> through. I've been using this successfully with both a PVR 250 and now
> a Nova-T 500

Since it's a Core i7 CPU, there's a good possibility that you'll have
a VT-d capable chipset, which will allow hardware-supported
passthrough of PCI and PCI-express devices in KVM [1] or Xen [2] (or
Vmware if you really want to use such things ;)).

I've just upgraded my motherboard in order to try this out with KVM,
MythTV and my three tuners. I hope I can get it working, so I can run
some clean enterprise Linux on the bare metal (eg. CentOS) for
stability, and then use a more bleeding edge Linux distribution for
MythTV (eg. MythBuntu or Arch Linux) - I'm tired of debugging my
headless backend by RS232 every time it doesn't boot after a full
system update.

[1] http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_to_assign_devices_with_VT-d_in_KVM
[2] http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/VTdHowTo

Regards
Kenni


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