Windows 10 nVidia passthrough nightmare

[iphillips]

Long time unraid user here.  Haven't really had any serious problems until now, but I'm ready to give up over this one.

 

I had a working Windows 10 VM until recently, when a USB card started to get finicky.  Before I realized it was a hardware problem, I decided to wipe the VM and start from scratch.  Big mistake, apparently.

 

Intel Haswell-E system.  I'm passing through an nVidia GTX1050ti and one of my motherboard's onboard USB controllers.  Both are stubbed.  VBIOS image for the 1050 is valid, and gave me no problems before (nVidia card was set as the primary GPU).

 

Installing Windows 10 Home version from an official ISO, downloaded from Microsoft one week ago.  I have a valid license, however activation seems to have no bearing on the issue.

 

I've tried installing via VNC, applying all updates, and then installing drivers.  This results in different interesting behaviour -- notably, that whatever happens, after about five minutes or so, the VM will crash and get caught in a boot loop.  After a few reboots, I'm greeted with the recovery screen.  Switching back to VNC and no longer passing through the GPU allows Windows to boot normally again.

 

The boot loops begin a few minutes after either attempting to install the latest drivers off a USB stick, or a few minutes after installing the VirtIO internet driver, presumably because Windows is attempting to find an nVidia driver on its own to install.

 

To rule out a bad GPU, I swapped out a GTX950 for the GTX1050ti.  It exhibits the same maddening behaviour.

 

The GPU is either primary or secondary, depending on what I'm trying that particular minute.  (I also have an AMD R9 that I use for a macOS VM -- I've tried passing it to the Windows VM; video works but sound does not, but I haven't fought much of that battle)

Both GPUs are stubbed, XML edited with the appropriate "multifunction='on'" and triple checked that settings are correct for bus/function.

 

Not sure what other info might be helpful (logs, XML etc)..  but here's my VM XML from my latest failed attempt and my IOMMU groups.  Unraid is set to boot in legacy mode, permit UEFI boot is deselected.

 

Any help would be immensely appreciated.

 

 

VM XML.txt IOMMU Groups.txt VFIO PCI log.txt