USB Passthrough Nightmares

[iphillips]

Meh, maybe not nightmares, but I'm starting to pull my hair out a bit.

 

I'm trying to run a couple VMs as daily-use computers.  One, a Windows 10 machine, is primarily used for gaming (emulation mostly, Dolphin, CEMU, etc).  It was working very well until unRAID 6.9, when things got weird.  I've had to edit my registry to explicitly turn on MSI signalling for my GPU (1050ti), etc. etc. to keep things from crashing constantly, but now I've got it working well.  My Mac VM is coming along nicely, Big Sur is passing through to my Radeon R9.

 

USB passthrough is killing me, though.  My X99 motherboard seems to have a pair of Intel USB controllers.  I've fiddled with BIOS settings to get them listed separately in unRAID without fiddling with unsafe interrupts or any of that other nonsense.  I'm giving one of them to unRAID, the other is stubbed and my Windows VM is playing nicely with it.

 

When it comes to adding another controller for the Mac, though, things go sideways.  After fighting with a few cards that don't seem to handle PCI reset properly (one VL805-based, one FL1100-based, one FL1100-based with a VL812 hub controller), I just picked up a Renesas u720201-based card that behaves properly when shutting down and starting VMs.

 

Of course, it seems that unless I'm doing something wrong, u720201 cards are not natively supported by macOS.  I've tried assigning it to the Windows VM instead, but then that VM started locking up after 15 seconds or so.  Restarted in safe mode, ensured that MSI signalling was enabled for that card, but I can't seem to get it to work.

 

So.  I'm four USB cards in, and zero-for-four.  The Mac seems to do okay with the onboard X99 controller, but I apparently need that for the Windows VM. I'm making do in the meantime by passing through individual USB devices through the Renesas card to the Mac VM, but that's not a long term solution.

 

Not posting logs or XML yet since I'm looking for more of a plan of action..  6.9 and beyond have made my Windows VM incredibly fragile with my current hardware setup so I don't want to mess with that much..  Is it possible to boot unRAID from a PCI USB card and stub both the onboard controllers?  Is there another PCI USB card that I should be looking at instead (I have an x4 slot available) that the Mac will play nice with?  Should I give up entirely and find a new hobby?

 

Would love some feedback.  Thanks!