Vfio kernel module for pci passthrough

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1

Hello IPFire team,

Thanks for the great work!

I am currently trying to set up my new server with IPFire and would like to pci passthrough a TV card to a virtual machine.
Unfortunately, I fail because of the missing vfio kernel modules.
As a test, I rebuilt IPFire and in the kernel config i add the following modules:

CONFIG_VFIO_IOMMU_TYPE1 = m
CONFIG_VFIO_VIRQFD = m
CONFIG_VFIO = m
# CONFIG_VFIO_NOIOMMU is not set
CONFIG_VFIO_PCI = m
CONFIG_VFIO_PCI_VGA = y
CONFIG_VFIO_PCI_MMAP = y
CONFIG_VFIO_PCI_INTX = y
CONFIG_VFIO_PCI_IGD = y
CONFIG_VFIO_MDEV = m
CONFIG_VFIO_MDEV_DEVICE = m

and then I was able to successfully pass my TV card through to a virtual machine in qemu / kvm.

Would it be possible to include the kernel modules mentioned above in the standard x86_64 kernel configuration?

Thanks Markus

2

Which firewall needs TV Card?

3

The firewall itself does not need the TV card, I want to run IPFire directly on the hardware and pass the TV card through to a virtual machine that runs on IPFire.

4

I hope your request will be considered.
But IMO, i would not use IPFire as KVM host.
I would use many other things (VirtualBox, ProxMox, ESXi, even Podman on CentOS 8) for virtualize hardware, then I’ll run IPfire and the other VM as a guest.
Primarily, IPFire is a Firewall and lacks of many other useful tools and options to run smoothly as hypervisor.

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