virtual machine +tv-card

[maverick0815]

I was wondering...if I was going to tinker around with something like 12.04...and I wanted to also keep my running system intact...I could try to virtualise it. So far no problem. But what I was wondering about, is for example my TV-card, that is residing in my server. Is it actually possible to utilise it from within a virtual machine?

[mkbrown69]

It depends...

The Hypervisor has to support PCI device passthru.  The motherboard chipset and the CPU have to support it (VT/d or IOMMU).  If it's a PCI card, rather than PCI express, you may have to also pass through the PCI bridge chip, and all devices after it (in other words, all PCI devices may need to be passed through, not just the PCI TV card).

When all that is said and done, it may work, or it may not, depending on the quality of the TV card drivers.  Some work fine when the device is passed through, others may not.

I'm not trying to discourage you... just want you to know that it may or may not work, and there's a lot of dependencies to work through before trying it.

Hope that helps!

/Mike

[mkbrown69]

Just to give you an alternate idea...

I run LMCE 10.04 as a virtual on a Debian Wheezy KVM host.  My current production MythTV environment is running on the host (Myth 0.25), where I have two HVR-1600 TV cards.  My motherboard won't support PCI passthrough, so my plan eventually is to upgrade the 10.04 instance to 12.04 and Myth 0.25, make it the master and restore my database and files onto it, and then make the host Mythbackend a slave backend to the virtualized master.  So, the slave running on the host would own the tuners, and the virtualized master would just schedule the slave to handle the recordings.

So, some food for thought if you don't want to (or can't) deal with the whole passthru option.

HTH!

/Mike

[maverick0815]

hmm...sounds like an awful can of worms....I'll sleep on it