Yesterday I played a bit with qemu and the VT-d/IOMMU extension. The Vt-d extension present in many modern processors allows you to forward a PCI-device directly to your virtual machine so you can access it from the virtual machine as if it were a real device. This can be very helpful to develop drivers for PCI-devices without having to reboot the whole computer all the time.
For example in my PC I use my Intel-onboard graphic as my main graphics card but I also have a Radeon in the PCI-express slot so I tried to forward it to my Haiku VM and it was more or less successful ;). To do that under Linux you have to detach the card from its real driver (probably the radeon kernel module under linux) and give it to the pci-stub module (you might have to load it first). To get the PCI-IDs and all the other information use lspci.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pfoetchen/2012-04-07_playing_around_qemu_and_vtd/