Parallel Port in Xen domU

For my home server I wanted to act a Xen domU as CUPS printing server. Therefore I needed access to my parallel printer connected to the Xen server. How are I/O-ports handled in Xen?

The I/O-addresses of the devices which can be found with cat /proc/ioports can be redirected from the Xen dom0. You have to enter the address range of the device you want to use in a domU in their configuration file (/etc/xen/domain-config). For my parallel port it would be:

ioports = [ '0278-027a' ]

Further I make sure that my dom0 does not access the device by removing parallel port support in the kernel configuration. When you boot then a domU kernel with parallel port and printer support it can access the device natively. Here a cut out from dmesg:

parport0: PC-style at 0x278 [PCSPP,TRISTATE]
parport0: Printer, Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 6P
lp0: using parport0 (polling).

In CUPS the printer is now accessible under /dev/lp0.

Unfortunately the documentation about this feature of Xen is a little bit rare. Another interesting thing is the redirection of PCI devices to a domU. Unfortunately I did not test this at my setup yet. I hope to come back to this topic later. For your creativity here some more examples from the net:

dulug.de – serielle Schnittstelle mit XEN

wiki.xensource.com – Assign hardware to DomU with PCI Backend as module

PCI Delegation in Xen