Thanks to Xen 4.3, it is now possible to suspend / resume dom0 while domUs are running. Unfortunately, if you have a VM actively using pci passthrough, the whole machine completely locks up about 10 seconds after resuming from S3 sleep.

As Xen is a lot more geared to servers I realize I might be an edge case; However, I would really like to be able to suspend my entire machine to S3 with VMs actively using PCI passthrough (in my case, a video card and USB controller). For quite some time I thought I was out of luck. After learning about the hot swapping capabilities of Xen 4.2+ and its pciback driver, I thought I would take another whack at it.

My solution is to create a custom script which detaches all PCI passthrough devices on the VM before going to sleep. That same script would re-attach those devices to my VM on resume.

My dom0 is currently Linux Mint 16 so I placed the resulting script in the /etc/pm/sleep.d/ directory and named it 20_win8.1 . It works like a charm! I can suspend and resume to my heart’s content without having to worry about if I remembered to shut down my VM first.

My script is below. Be sure to modify it for the BDF of your devices and the name of your VM(s) if you decide to use it.

#!/bin/bash
#Sleep / hibernate script for Xen with active DomUs using PCI Passthrough
#This script is necessary to avoid freezing of dom0 on resume for Xen 4.3
#Modified 08/19/2014

#Name of the VM we're passing PCI things to
VM="win8.1"

#B:D.F of PCI devices passed through to VM
VIDCARD="01:00.0"
VIDCARDAUDIO="01:00.1"
FRONTUSB="00:1d.0"

#xen attach/detach commands. Replace with xm if you're using that toolstack instead
ATTACH="xl pci-attach"
DETACH="xl pci-detach"

case "$1" in
    hibernate|suspend)
        $DETACH $VM $VIDCARD
        $DETACH $VM $VIDCARDAUDIO
        $DETACH $VM $FRONTUSB
        ;;
    thaw|resume)
        $ATTACH $VM $VIDCARD
        $ATTACH $VM $VIDCARDAUDIO
        $ATTACH $VM $FRONTUSB
        ;;
    *)
        ;;
esac
exit $?