WinXP + PCIe Passthrough

[fpdragon]

Hi,

I want to replace an old WinXP test machine with an Proxmox VM. The software is very specific and not compatible with any newer OS and there are several PCIe cards that are used.

So Proxmox and a modern HW seemed to be a promissing solution for that problem.

I was able to activate PCIe passthrough via Grub and other console commands.
I installed a fresh WinXP SP3 Proxmox VM.
And I routed through the PCIe devices.

However I noticed that there are some limitations.
First, I noticed that I don't have the choice to select PCI or PCIe.
And although I am able to see the PCIe devices in the device manager, I was not able to finish the driver setup successfully. Could be related or not.

Question 1:
In theory, is it possible to use PCIe passthrough with WinXP?
Machine type: pc-i440fx-7.2
BIOS: SeaBIOS
Proxmox VE 7.4-3

Question 2:
I read that some PCIe passthrough features are limited to Q35 machine type only. Is that correct?
Is it possible to install WinXP as Q35?
If yes, how to get the missing drivers and how to load it in the setup. The setup requires a floppy disk.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks!

Stefan

 

[LnxBil]

If yes, how to get the missing drivers and how to load it in the setup. The setup requires a floppy disk.

Have you tried adding another cdrom drive and using the virtio iso from there? For XP, you may want to use a really old one. AFAIK the XP drives have been dropped years ago.

 

[fpdragon]

Have you tried adding another cdrom drive and using the virtio iso from there? For XP, you may want to use a really old one. AFAIK the XP drives have been dropped years ago.

Interesting.
I tried to use the latest virtio as cdrom drive but there I found no files for xp, as you said. However I was confused since the WinXP setup asks for a floppy drive to preload drivers so I am not sure if a cd rom is possible to load virtio drivers?
Do you know which version is the latest that supports XP?

 

[LnxBil]

However I was confused since the WinXP setup asks for a floppy drive to preload drivers so I am not sure if a cd rom is possible to load virtio drivers?

XP is so old, floppy disks where one thing to go, yet the VirtIO drivers are not small enough for floppy disks. Just install XP on an IDE drive, install the VirtIO drivers afterwards, add a second disk with virtIO SCSI or virtio and get it detected in disk management und then you're good to change your IDE disk to a (SCSI) VirtIO and it should work fine.

Do you know which version is the latest that supports XP?

No, yet 2k was in 2008-12-29 (i still have this iso file flying around).