Objective of OpenWRT/x86?

[Philip Prindeville]

> On May 1, 2023, at 6:59 PM, Alberto Bursi <bobafetthotmail at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 01/05/23 06:40, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>> On Apr 28, 2023, at 11:18 PM, Elliott Mitchell <ehem+openwrt at m5p.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 12:04:15PM -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> [snip]
>>> 
>>>> See above: the radios and antennae I can get as add-ons for a Xeon-D 1U pizza box or even an APU6 mPCIe slot are vastly inferior to what ODM purpose-built hardware like an U6-LR can do in terms of cost and performance.
>>>> 
>>>> Um... you can't "virtualize" WiFi in any VM I've ever seen.
>>> 
>>> You can though pass PCIe devices to a VM.  The hardware will physically
>>> attach to the control host, but a VM will be able to do anything it wants
>>> with it.
>> So the guest has the potential to crash or hang the host?
> 
> Passthrough devices aren't really handled by the host OS (it's commonly required to blacklist their kernel drivers to make sure the host does NOT touch them) so in most cases if something hard-crashes and a kernel panics it's still all drama that happens inside the VM. This is how it usually goes in my experience.
> 
> GPU passthrough can cause a whole host to lock up and require power cycle. I've seen that happen in the wild only once (it was repeatable, fun times), but imho it's a IOMMU or GPU issue not a "normal" thing that should happen.
> 
> -Alberto


You can also lock up the PCIe bus so that the CPU can't access the bus or bus-attached devices like disk controllers, network interfaces, etc.