Direct I/O Hardware and Software Requirements

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To successfully use the direct I/O (DIO) feature to assign direct I/O devices to domains, you must run the appropriate software and use supported PCIe cards.

Hardware Requirements. Only certain PCIe cards can be used as a direct I/O endpoint device on an I/O domain. You can still use other cards in your Oracle VM Server for SPARC environment but they cannot be used with the DIO feature. Instead, they can be used for service domains and for I/O domains that have entire root complexes assigned to them.

Refer to your platform's hardware documentation to verify which cards can be used on your platform. For an up-to-date list of supported PCIe cards, see https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=REFERENCE&id=1325454.1.

Note - The SPARC T7 series server, SPARC M7 series server and SPARC S7 series server have an I/O controller that provides several PCIe buses and you can assign PCIe cards to different domains. For information, see Creating a Root Domain by Assigning PCIe Buses.
Software Requirements. To use the DIO feature, the following domains must run the supported OS:
- Root domain. At least the Oracle Solaris 11.3 OS.
  
  The recommended practice is for all domains to run at least the Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 OS plus the required patches in Fully Qualified Oracle Solaris OS Versions in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.4 Installation Guide or the Oracle Solaris 11.3 OS.
- I/O domain. At least the Oracle Solaris 11 OS. Note that additional feature support is included in more recent Oracle Solaris 11 releases.

Note - All PCIe cards that are supported on a platform are supported in the root domains. See the documentation for your platform for the list of supported PCIe cards. However, only direct I/O-supported PCIe cards can be assigned to I/O domains.

To add or remove PCIe endpoint devices by using the direct I/O feature, you must first enable I/O virtualization on the PCIe bus itself.

You can use the ldm set-io or ldm add-io command to set the iov property to on. You can also use the ldm add-domain or ldm set-domain command to set the rc-add-policy property to iov. See the ldm(1M) man page.

Rebooting the root domain affects direct I/O, so carefully plan your direct I/O configuration changes to maximize the direct I/O-related changes to the root domain and to minimize root domain reboots.