Wow. I'm Impressed AKA Passthrough On A Budget

[Squid]

A little back story here.

 

Since v6 was released, I have been looking at my motherboard (which states that it supports IOMMU) on my main server, and trying to figure out how to get rid of my multimedia machine.

 

Unfortunately, I kept on running into the same problem of how to run all of my hard drives, since the board only has 4 onboard SATA, 1x PCIe16, and 1xPCIe x1 (and a PCI slot for good measure).

 

Yesterday I completely ran out of space on both servers again.  Server A is 11x 3TB + cache drive, and server B is 12 drives mixed sizes.  My only real option on upgrading drives was to buy a 4TB, replace the 3TB parity in the main server, toss the 3TB into the secondary server and pull out a 1TB drive.

 

Net result is that I bought a 4TB drive and gained 1TB in space (but am better situated for next month when I will have to upgrade again).  Looking at how much $/TB I effectively gained and that perfectly good 1TB drive sitting on my desk doing nothing gave me a brainstorm.  Since I'm going to have a bunch of drives sitting around doing nothing as the other servers get upgraded, wouldn't it be more cost effective to build another server.  Oh but wait.  Then I have to convince my wife to let me get another hot swap case, etc, etc etc.

 

Hold the phone...  Why not rearrange the motherboards, and see if I can't get another server running with passthrough and run openelec on it.

 

So, did a quick little test here.

 

Took my Gigabyte GA-F2A55M-HD2 (you can buy it at newegg for $59), My A8-6600K (newegg $99), 4 Gig of Ram, grabbed a new v6 trial key so that I wouldn't mess anything up, tossed the 1TB into it.

 

Found in my junk pile an NVIDIA 8400GS, and went to create OpenElec with 512Meg RAM from the template.  No dice... Wouldn't even boot up.

Substitued another junk card I've had forever (ATI HD4350 - newegg $34).

 

Passed it through, and (TBH I was a little surprised here) it worked.  Proceeded to pass through the HDMI audio from the vid card, and OpenElec still worked no problems.  Even the remote control via my USB IR worked.

 

This should win an award for the cheapest passed through system...  And what's even more amazing is the every single device is in its own IOMMU group.

 

Obviously very early here to say if there are any problems with the system at all, but initially I am very impressed.

 

Even better was that this was all a point and click operation, no editing of any XML, and I've never even paid any attention to any of the KVM threads here at all.  10 Minutes start to finish.

 

Hats off to LT.  I'm blown away right now...  Now I just have to figure out where the .key file is for my unused licence.  Got 4 onboard sata ports, another 2 through a PCIex1 card and if I really had to, another 4 from the PCI slot to populate with all the drives that I'll wind up pulling out from the servers as I upgrade.

[jonp]

 

Well done squid!  Thanks for the kudos glad it all worked out for you.  That's definitely GPU pass through on a budget, but hey, for something simple like a media player, that's more than enough!