Win7-HVM: onboard sound

[Tom]

Is it possible to make the sound work in my Win7-HVM if I use the onboard sound of my mother board (which is also working fine with any other Fedora-based VM)?

I've understood that as of today it's not possible to use PCI-devices with HVMs, but maybe it's different in case of onboard sound ... (sorry, if not but I'm a noob).

Thanks!

[Eric Shelton]

Sorry.  Currently there is no solution for sound in HVMs.  The two likely paths to getting sound working in a Windows HVM are: (1) getting PCI passthrough working for HVM domains again, and doing passthrough of a sound device, or (2) sorting out a way to do network audio streaming from Windows to Linux (or even better, in both directions).  A less likely third option is getting QEMU's sound support to work with the infrastructure used between the PV-based domains.

Eric

[Tim W]

I did not stay up to date in dev or github what exactly was the root cause of losing pci passthrough?  It works fine in current and past ver Xen.   I can doa search and read but just wanted a summary statement.

[Eric Shelton]

See https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1659

My hunch is that libvirt is not setting up PCI passthrough correctly for HVM domains.  This problem started with Qubes 3.0, which began use of libvirt for managing domains.  Plus, someone got HVM PCI passthrough working on Qubes 3.0+ using the xl toolchain, so that would appear to confirm that there is nothing broken in Xen and xl.

libxl has a very convoluted state machine for bringing up domains (callbacks within callbacks on top of callbacks), so there is a bit of a learning curve involved to sort out just what libvirt is not setting up correctly, but if you have some coding experience and the time, it should be a doable task.

Eric

[skat...@gmail.com]

Eric wrote, that the problems started only from R3.0 onwards. However, I am actually still using R2.0 but the sound doesn't work, neither.
Is there a way in R2.0 to make it work?

Thanks!

[Eric Shelton]

Although I never tried it myself, my understanding is that you should be able to do:

(1) PCI passthrough of a sound device to the HVM domain, or

(2) PCI passthrough of a USB controller to the HVM domain, and then attach a USB sound device.

Eric 

[Tom]

I'm afraid you are overestimating my abilities.

I would love to exercise option (1) but without a bullet proof instruction, I'm afraid I won't manage. Where can I learn something like this?

So if anybody can help me with that, you are most welcome to enlighten me! :-)

[walach.o...@gmail.com]

If I'm not mistaken, the suggestion is to go into qubes manager.
Right click and go into the settings of the VM you want to try this with.
Go to the Devices tab.
Find your audio device in the list on the left and put it on the right.

This should dedicate the device to the vm once you start the vm.

I've actually been trying to get sound to work in a Linux HVM (Void Linux) with no luck.

In my case, when I tried this, I started the machine, shut it down, and started it again.

Audio did work, but it would get stuck in stutter loops.

Hope you have better luck than I.

Enjoy!