Hi,

Im trying to get a NVIDIA P40 working on a ubuntu VM using the passthrough. I want to use run some AI projects etc. But no matter what i do, no matter which driver i install or how i install it i always get the message: nvidia-smi cannot communicate with the driver. I tried installing the driver through apt, through ubuntu-drivers, and throught the .run file from the nvidia website.

The card does show up in cpu-x as a nvidia p40. But it always says: no driver.

 

I then tried installing a windows 10 vm out of desperation. And now the P40 takes priority over the virtual graphics card and i get: guest has not initialized the display yet. Even though the P40 has no video out ports. So i cant attach a screen to it either.

Its driving me insane cause i have 30 days to verify the card even works before having to send it back... (ebay purchase). And i cant even get to a point where i can say its the driver that doesnt work or the card.

 

Can anyone tell me how to get that P40 to work in Ubuntu? Its where i intend to end up using it.

I've seen a lot of comments in random threads about P40s and ive tried to make sence of it but i really cant make hear or tails of it.

On 1/31/2023 at 2:05 AM, KptnKMan said:

Looks like I figured it out, I had left out the steps to add the extra lines to my Win11 VM, which enabled 64GB ReBAR support.

 

So looks like the checklist to enable this:

- Host BIOS Enable ReBAR support

- Host BIOS Enable 4G Decoding

- Enable & Boot Custom Kernel syslinux configuration (near beginning of this thread)

- Boot Unraid in UEFI Mode

- VM must use UEFI BIOS

- VM must have the top line of XML from <domain type='kvm'> to:

<domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>

- VM must have added the following (after the </device> line, before the </domain> line):

  <qemu:commandline>
    <qemu:arg value='-fw_cfg'/>
    <qemu:arg value='opt/ovmf/X-PciMmio64Mb,string=65536'/>
  </qemu:commandline>

 

After that, looks like everything worked for me as well.

I'm just summarising this for anyone looking for a complete idea.
 

I'll be testing performance over the next weeks as well to see if I'm seeing any improvement.

 

This is great, exactly what I've been waiting for!

I'm really glad this worked for you! 😁