Share SATA drive between hypervisor partitions?

[stephenmcintyre]

Is there a way to partition the T1040 and have each partition guest share the SATA drive? Can I set up a separate virtual disk on a SATA drive for each separate partition? or can I physically partition the SATA drive and have each hypervisor partition access the separate SATA drive partition. i.e. fdisk the SSD into multiple primary partitions.

[adeel]

Hi,

Any controller (SATA/eMMC etc) can't be shared physically between multiple guests. You need virtual disk to be able to access separate partitions from different guest. Freescale HV should have support for VirtIO and Virtual disks. I think you need more than just DMA sharing like interrupts, command submission etc. KVM and Xen supports disk virtualization. Does QorIQ support KVM/Xen?

-Adeel

[stephenmcintyre]

After exploring the documentation I found that the HV partitions do not have direct access to the SATA disk drive. I see that a DMA window can be set up for each hv partition. Does anybody know if the SATA disk drive can accept DMA transfers from multiple partitions?

[bpe · Accepted solution]

SATA drives are apart form  DMA, which is initiated and
controlled by SATA controllers. Under Topaz Hypervisor, you cannot share
SATA controllers, subsequently, a guest that does not own a SATA
controller, cannot  access any SATA drive connected to it. Use
QEMU/KVM virtualization is you want to share an HDD. This approach
uses the host kernel as a hypervisor, which allows a more fine-grain
resource sharing, for the price of higher overhead.

Have a great day,
Platon

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