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.
Software Requirements. To use the DIO feature, the following domains must run the supported OS:
Root domain. At least the Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 OS plus patch ID 145868-01 or the Oracle Solaris 11 OS.
The recommended practice is for all domains to run at least the Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 OS plus the required patches in or the Oracle Solaris 11.1.10.5.0 OS.
I/O domain. Any Oracle Solaris OS that is supported by the platform.
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.