NAME
xpci
—
Xen frontend paravirtualized PCI
pass-through driver
SYNOPSIS
xpci* at xenbus?
pci* at xpci?
DESCRIPTION
Thexpci
driver is the frontend part of the PCI
pass-through functionality that can be used by Xen guest domains to
communicate with PCI devices.
From a guest point of view, xpci
is
similar to a pci(4) bus, except that the guest talks with the PCI backend driver
instead of the real physical device directly.
When the host domain is NetBSD, the
xpci
driver is backed by a
pciback(4) driver within the dom0.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The xpci
driver first appeared in
NetBSD 5.1.
AUTHORS
The xpci
driver was written by
Manuel Bouyer
<bouyer@NetBSD.org>.
SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS
As PCI passthrough offers the possibility for guest domains to send arbitrary PCI commands to a physical device, this has direct impact on the overall stability and security of the system. For example, in case of erroneous or malicious commands, the device could overwrite physical memory portions, via DMA.