- Minor
I think it's better to describe what I observed rather than try and describe the potential bug. I have a Windows 11 VM that uses an m.2 drive that is passed-through. I bought another drive to use with another VM for testing. I added heatsinks and because my motherboard has a capacitor in the way, the first drive no longer fits in the same m.2 slot with the heatsink on, so I swapped it was an m.2 SATA controller.
When I booted up, I set both m.2 drives to be passed through on the System Devices page and rebooted. I had some issues with drives being disabled and on standby and eventually found out the SATA controller was being passed to the VM. Earlier when I checked the System Devices page to passthrough the drives, I did not check to make sure the SATA controller was NOT passed through. It should not be but it is now in the m.2 slot where the first drive used to be so that makes sense.
However, after I set the drive to be passed through and rebooted, I went to the VMs to assign the drives. The VMs were previously existing, one had the original passed-through drive, and the other was using a disk image. So I was now setting them both to use a passed-through drive. This is where the bug comes in because neither VM template showed the SATA controller under "Other PCI Devices" at the time I assigned the drives. I also set the boot priority for the passed-through drive to 1 and it gave me an error saying there is already a device with a boot priority of 1. I checked the template, even using find to look for "boot" and there was no device in the template with a boot priority of 1. I think the SATA controller was not showing up in the template for some reason.
Now there are a few things I am not certain about because I rebooted a few times during my troubleshooting. As I mentioned, I am not sure if the SATA controller was set to be passed through after I installed the new hardware. It should not be, but because it now resides in the slot where the drive was set to be passthrough, it seems to have caused an issue. I am 95% certain that the SATA controller was not showing up in the edit VM template for either of the VMs at the time I was reconfiguring the drives. For one, I'm pretty sure it would have stuck out because there was only 1 device listed previously and I think I would have noticed it is there were 3 when I was expecting 2, especially if it was checked. For another, there's the fact that it complained about the boot order that was not reflected in the template. Currently, one VM shows both the passed through drives under "Other PCI Devices" and the other additionally shows the SATA controller. I check and the SATA controller is not set to be passed through. I'm not sure exactly what is going on, but it seems to have caused some sort of inconsistency in the UI.