Context: my partner and I are planning to go travelling for a year, and we want to be able to take a single tiny computer with us that can be both a portable server and a gaming rig when we need it. The NUC 11 Enthusiast seemed perfect for that purpose - it's the size of a paperback, has a punchy 4-core/8-thread processor, an Intel XE iGPU that can handle hardware transcoding for Plex duties, and a dedicated RTX2060 to pass through to a Windows VM that we can spin up for gaming. I've had a couple of PCs set up this way in the past, and I've always been able to resolve any issues that came up.

 

Getting everything set up on the NUC was surprisingly easy, but when it came to passing through the RTX2060 to a Windows 10 VM we ran into the dreaded Code 43 issue. We've tried absolutely every solution out there (ripping VBIOS, removing headers, every BIOS/machine type combination, allowing unsafe interrupts, setting PCIe ACS override to 'both', ensuring all the card's functions are in the same IOMMU group, stubbing the USB/serial controllers, setting multifunction='on', installing Nvidia drivers while the card is disabled, etc). It's reached the stage where the only thing I haven't tried is setting the boot mode to Legacy, which seems to resolve the issue for most users.

 

Unfortunately the 11th-gen NUCs are the first Intel systems to have removed support for legacy booting entirely. It is only possible to boot in UEFI mode. And as far as I can tell, there's no bulletproof solution to fixing Code 43 errors when Unraid is booting in UEFI mode. Every guide I read ends with '…and then I set boot mode to Legacy and everything worked'. But that's not an option for us, and it probably won't be an option for a lot of users as manufactures continue to end support for legacy booting.

 

Are there any tried-and-tested solutions for Nvidia GPU passthrough that don't require users to switch to legacy boot mode? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

19 hours ago, stevehopkinson said:

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated

Can you attach diagnostics file?

And before starting to look at the configurations, did you use the latest nvidia drivers?

Yes, this was all using the latest Nvidia drivers (496.49).

I'm not sure which diagnostics file to attach, as I've run in many configuration variations and am having the same issue with a wide range of setups. The key limitation seems to be that there's no combination of values that will get the passthrough working correctly when boot mode is UEFI.

Edited November 2, 20214 yr by stevehopkinson

Choose a configuration then, and attach diagnostics, because without a starting point nobody can help.