Member Avatar for DeanMSands3

I'm running a google search for "Virtual Machine PCI Pass-through" (making minimal progress) but I thought I'd ask your advice too.
I have an older (~2005) PCI WiFi card from Generic Off-brand Chinese Corporation X. I'm running Windows 7x64. The company that made the card has since gone out of business before a Vista driver was put out and there's little information on the card itself.

So... now what?

I'm considering running a Win2K VM to connect to the device, have it use its NT5 drivers, then have it ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) back to the host. Or something.

You have any interesting advice, DaniWeb? I'd love to hear from you.
-Dean

  • 4 Contributors
  • 4 Replies
  • 1K Views
  • 2 Years Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by CimmerianX

Recommended Answers

All 4 Replies

Member Avatar for rubberman

Most VM's cannot access hardware directly except through the host OS, although this is not necessarily true if you are using hardware level virtualization such as kvm, and all operating systems are running virtually. Then I think you can expose different hardware devices such as this to each operating system as needed. Unfortunately I have not had the time to play with that so I am only going on what I THINK, not what I KNOW... :-)

That said, you might be able to run a Linux host OS with this hardware, and then run your Windows 7 OS in a VM under the Linux host. I do that quite nicely on my system. I run a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Scientific Linux) and Oracle's VirtualBox works a treat!

Member Avatar for rubberman

Ok. After some research (a few minutes reading articles google brought up), I don't see that you can do what I mentioned above regarding KVM or other virtual machine tools... Doesn't mean it isn't possible, but I does mean that it would not be easy I suspect.

Anyway, here is an article about doing something like that with Hyper-V: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh440250(v=vs.85).aspx

Ok. Just finished searching the www.linux-kvm.org site and find this about PCI hotplug support, so it may be possible to use KVM on a Linux host to provide access to PCI devices to guest operating systems: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Hotadd_pci_devices

Member Avatar for hell hansen

Hii think you can use your wifi on vm! But not really directly. You have to connect to wifi using your host. And then you bridge the interface on vm, and if the gateway has dhcp, you'll get the ip from your router wifi! Ather wise you can add static ip. I do it using vmware or kvm. Regards

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.