@olivierlambert
Good, that's the answer I needed thanks.

@imad2nsi
Thanks for your research. I built a system around a Xeon E3-1226v3 with VT-D support for the express purpose of using PCI passthrough. Now I see I've wasted my time and money.

@andrew That looks promising. Of course 2.2 is wide-open with vulnerabilities so this VM lives well away from the outside word.

@danp
I did upgrade it from kernel 2.0 when 2.2 came out. I use it to run 1980's Xenix executables and kernel 2.2 is the last to support the iBCS emulation kernel modules.

Is that going to work? The 17 year old guest is running in VMware at the moment. i am considering building a new system based on xcp-ng but only if that guest will run. It's nothing fancy, just needs filesystem and networking.