GT610 Graphics Card Passthrough issue


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Hi guys, a small issue I have and I'm after clarification/best solution.

 

I have been running VMs for quite a while now, including a linux box with 2 passthrough NICs (firewall/DMZ into my home network) and have never had a issue. Also passed through singular USB and even one of my motherboards USB controllers to different VMs. My issue now lies with graphics pass through.

I've achieved it before but never really had a use for it, until my wife saw me playing Super Mario and asked if it was possible on the living room TV so we can play together. I then came across the retroarch/advancedlauncher guide johnoden wrote and thought i'll give it a go.

 

So i've ripped out the old AMD HD3450 card I had previously used (with no issue passing through) and put in a GT610 I 'borrowed' from my daughter machine as it has HDMI so I can send video and audio to the TV.

Already a big fan of KODI and i run multiple instances around the house i figured i could use limetechs OpenELEC VM to make this all happen and replace the raspberry pi I currently use in the living room.

I have indeed managed all the above (and may write this up at some point, UCD post maybe), including pass through of a USB keyboard and xbox360 wireless receiver, but i have an issue with the graphics card. Specifically if I reboot the OpenELEC VM I get no video once booted again. I can gain graphics again, but have to reboot the entire server to get it, which takes ages, along with this the VMs logs are full of this libusb: error [submit_bulk_transfer] submiturb failed error -1 errno=28 (i think this may be to do with the xbox receiver).

 

From what I can gather the issue lies with the GT610 itself, it doesn't reset properly when the VM restarts, am I right?

If so is there a way of forcing it to? I have also read about pointing VMs at a different ROM that would allow this (but that's outside my knowledge and if anyone could point me in the right direction i'd be much obliged)

 

Failing all else I can also go out and get another card, but wanted to ask before i spend money unnecessarily. If this is my only option does anyone have a cheap recommendation (i'm in the UK and parts can be pricey).

 

Last question (maybe have my fingers slapped for wrong forum), but any idea when limetech will release an OpenELEC v6.0.0 template. I'm a growing fan of it and theres a few addtions to v6 that i would make use of.

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From what I have gathered in all my research so far, some GPUs just don't support this reset feature and there is no apparent way to "force" this to happen.  It's an issue with the GPU itself and not something we can solve from the unRAID side.

 

Have you tried both SeaBIOS and OVMF for the BIOS type?  Any difference?  As far as passing a ROM file, this is documented in the wiki here:  http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_6/VM_Management#Edit_XML_for_VM_to_supply_GPU_ROM_manually

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From what I have gathered in all my research so far, some GPUs just don't support this reset feature and there is no apparent way to "force" this to happen.  It's an issue with the GPU itself and not something we can solve from the unRAID side.

 

Have you tried both SeaBIOS and OVMF for the BIOS type?  Any difference?  As far as passing a ROM file, this is documented in the wiki here:  http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_6/VM_Management#Edit_XML_for_VM_to_supply_GPU_ROM_manually

 

I figured that was the case, as the old AMD 3450 i had ran like a charm and was able to be reset (if it was HDMI i'd keep it)

I have both bios types with no avail, shame as the card itself seems to perform well for a low end card.

 

As for trying another rom, i have followed the wiki, but I have no idea what rom 'could' even work with this card. Anything in the region of this model i have tried failed miserably.

 

Seems like buying another card is my best solution, current one that's caught my eye is a Radeon HD5450, I can currently get one for circa £20, should be good enough to run kodi and a few emulators, anyone have have one/know if they work?

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In 6.2 (in internal testing right now), we have made some serious "under the hood" changes with respect to GPU pass through.  These changes could have an impact on cards like the GT610 (inadvertently), but we won't know until we roll out the public beta for it and see.  So your choices are really to wait for 6.2 beta to see what happens, or buy another card now.

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Thanks for the reply Jon, sounds like promising news.

 

Sadly the VM dropped out on me while watching a TV Show last night, kind of lost my faith in it a little.

Where can I find the logs, as to better find out what is going on with it?

 

I've had to plug my raspberry pi back in for now, for stability, so waiting out for a new release should be too bad.

On that note do you have a time frame for release? or an idea when Openelec v6.0.0 willl be an available template?

 

 

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It definitely seems to be an issue with some GPU's not properly resetting as Jon describes.

I have the same card and experienced exactly the same issues. I have tried both the ASUS GT720 and a ASUS GT610 with the same results...

I am waiting to try OE 6.2 before I write off the cards the entirely. My challenge will then be to find a new passive single slot GPU that is known to work well for OE for my very small case!

 

Cheers,

 

BR

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... I figured that was the case, as the old AMD 3450 i had ran like a charm and was able to be reset (if it was HDMI i'd keep it)

 

I presume you know you can run a DVI -> HDMI cable and use the 3450 for video with no problem.  You would, of course, then need an audio output as well ... you could pass-through a USB audio adapter to the VM for that.

 

But clearly it'd be much better to just find a card that works with HDMI outputs.  I suspect the HD5450 will do the trick, but don't have any direct experience to confirm that.

 

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  • 1 year later...
  • 5 months later...

I can confirm this problem still persists with my Gigabyte GT610 SIlent on UnRAID v6.5.

 

I have managed to create my own UEFI BIOS for this card with the GOPUpd tool, but am unable to flash it because of the inherent size limitation of the EEPROM (or so I believe from the nvflash error messages). I am able to passthrough the GPU to my UEFI VM by specifying the BIOS in the VM config, but any shutdown of the guest and trying to reattach the GPU to the same or another guest will crash my whole host system. Disabling the GPU in the VM's Device Manager before shutdown of the guest did not prove fruitful (i.e host still crashed after the 2nd VM start).

Edited by kabloomy
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8 minutes ago, kabloomy said:

I can confirm this problem still persists with my Gigabyte GT610 SIlent on UnRAID v6.5.

 

I have managed to create my own UEFI BIOS for this card with the GOPUpd tool, but am unable to flash it because of the inherent size limitation of the EEPROM (or so I believe from the nvflash error messages). I am able to passthrough the GPU to my UEFI VM by specifying the BIOS in the VM config, but any shutdown of the guest and trying to reattach the GPU to the same or another guest will crash my whole host system. Disabling the GPU in the VM's Device Manager before shutdown of the guest did not prove fruitful (i.e host still crashed after the 2nd VM start).

 

Is there a Gigabyte tool to add GOP/UEFI to their cards? I never found one.

 

Try other mfrs UEFI BIOS. I have a GT620 (same card really) that is Nvidia generic and that has UEFI BIOS. Not tried it recently. I can send you the UEFI BIOS if you wanna try that?

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8 minutes ago, methanoid said:

 

Is there a Gigabyte tool to add GOP/UEFI to their cards? I never found one.

 

Try other mfrs UEFI BIOS. I have a GT620 (same card really) that is Nvidia generic and that has UEFI BIOS. Not tried it recently. I can send you the UEFI BIOS if you wanna try that?

 

Have a look at the GOPUpd tool at https://www.win-raid.com/t892f16-AMD-and-Nvidia-GOP-update-No-requests-DIY.html.

 

It lets you inject the UEFI portion into an existing vBIOS. I dumped the one from my card and injected the UEFI firmware portion (GOP) to the vBIOS. Luckily the GT620 is supported with this tool (GF119). I wasn't able to flash the actual vBIOS to the card with nvflash; it said the EEPROM size was too small to handle both the original vBIOS and the GOP.

 

I haven't tried the passthrough with a non-UEFI VM... so going to try that now with SeaBIOS...

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  • 1 year later...

I guess I need to add myself to the "No Love for the GT610" community.

 

For me - working with unRAID 6.6.7 on a DELL T310 (with Intel VT-d confirmed) with either SeaBOIS or OVMF, with CPU pass-through or emulated, and building a Windows 10/64bit image VM with the nVidia GT610 in it's own IOMMU group (13) is giving me the same headache in video passthrough as well. Note - I am using TeamViewer (v.14). And I followed the GPU ROM BIOS edits that SpaceInvaderOne had suggested, made sure that there was no added header - and I still can't get the nVidia Card to work reliably, after multiple attempts. I have other VMs that are working fine with TeamViewer, and with VNC/QXL, but nothing seems to be working reliably with the nVidia GT610. I might try one last shot at it with Windows 7/64, but not holding my breath for that one either.

 

After three nights, I think I am just going to find another video card to try. 

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  • 6 months later...
On 4/24/2019 at 5:28 AM, rollieindc said:

I guess I need to add myself to the "No Love for the GT610" community.

 

For me - working with unRAID 6.6.7 on a DELL T310 (with Intel VT-d confirmed) with either SeaBOIS or OVMF, with CPU pass-through or emulated, and building a Windows 10/64bit image VM with the nVidia GT610 in it's own IOMMU group (13) is giving me the same headache in video passthrough as well. Note - I am using TeamViewer (v.14). And I followed the GPU ROM BIOS edits that SpaceInvaderOne had suggested, made sure that there was no added header - and I still can't get the nVidia Card to work reliably, after multiple attempts. I have other VMs that are working fine with TeamViewer, and with VNC/QXL, but nothing seems to be working reliably with the nVidia GT610. I might try one last shot at it with Windows 7/64, but not holding my breath for that one either.

 

After three nights, I think I am just going to find another video card to try. 

did you try this?: see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

 

 

"Error 43: Driver failed to load" on Nvidia GPUs passed to Windows VMs

Note:

This may also fix SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED boot crashes related to Nvidia drivers.

This may also fix problems under linux guests.

Since version 337.88, Nvidia drivers on Windows check if an hypervisor is running and fail if it detects one, which results in an Error 43 in the Windows device manager. Starting with QEMU 2.5.0 and libvirt 1.3.3, the vendor_id for the hypervisor can be spoofed, which is enough to fool the Nvidia drivers into loading anyway. All one must do is add hv_vendor_id=1234567890ab to the cpu parameters in their QEMU command line, or by adding the following line to their libvirt domain configuration. The vendor_id can be whatever you prefer, however it is important to note that the vendor_id must be exactly 12 characters long, per the libvirt documentation [2]:

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On 11/13/2019 at 1:19 PM, luca2 said:

All one must do is add hv_vendor_id=1234567890ab to the cpu parameters in their QEMU command line, or by adding the following line to their libvirt domain configuration.

No, I had not tried that. Thanks very much for that follow up!

 

I might go back to that at some point, but just tonight - I bought a MSI Radeon R7 240 card (yes, I know, dog slow) but the VM and video was running flawlessly right out of the box inside the Dell T310 and porting out with TeamViewer was a piece of cake. So I'm currently loathe to change the VM configuration back to the Asus GT 1030, but after a week or so of "dogging" it - I might just do that and see if this works.

 

Again, really appreciate the follow up!

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