Passing through Controllers the way Linus did it?


johmei

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I'm confused...I was following the steps laid out in a video from LinusTechTips about setting up a VM in unRAID, and he mentioned having an entire USB controller passed through to the VM, and that sounded like EXACTLY how I wanted to do this.  And even better, it seemed like the same method should work for any controller.  Well, I tried his method with an onboard USB controller, my PCI Auzentech Sound card (that, for some reason, does not show up under the drop down list for sound cards), and my onboard network controller.  And not a single one of them showed up under "Other PCI Devices" as shown here:

 

 

I restarted the system as instructed, and placed the pci-stub.ids= line in the Syslinux config and it's just not showing up.  I don't understand.  The idea makes sense, I more than halfway understand what I'm attempting to do (not just blindly following instructions) yet no device I've added in the Syslinux config is showing up as selectable when creating a VM.

 

I started looking around here and found guides that confused me even more because they did things COMPLETELY different from the way Linus did it, and not a single guide had any mention of the "Other PCI Devices" selection box.

 

What am I missing here?

 

Thanks!

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Linus was using as yet an unreleased V6.2 of Unraid.  That's the main difference.

 

I'm sure we can help you get it setup though.  But we need a fair bit more information...

 

This post here is a good example of a first post for troubleshooting KVM issues as these things are hardware dependent...

 

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Linus was using as yet an unreleased V6.2 of Unraid.  That's the main difference.

 

I'm sure we can help you get it setup though.  But we need a fair bit more information...

 

This post here is a good example of a first post for troubleshooting KVM issues as these things are hardware dependent...

 

Oooh!  That makes sense!  I even knew it was a newer beta version yet it just didn't click.  So it looks like in place of having to manually add the devices in your virtual machines XML config file, you'll be able to simply select the devices you added to the syslinux configuration when you setup your virtual machine?

 

I'll check out that sticky too when I get home and see if I can get it working that way and post back here if I have any problems. (I didn't try, only read them and got confused when it was completely different from what I watched)

 

Thanks very much! :D

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Correct.  In 6.2, we will be rendering an "other PCI devices" section and the logic for that is continuing to improve.  One really cool thing is that you will NOT need to actually stub the devices in all situations (perhaps for Network controllers, but not for USB controllers).  This will allow you to assign a USB controller to a VM and then when the VM is shut down, return that controller to being managed by the host.  Pretty neat, eh?

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Correct.  In 6.2, we will be rendering an "other PCI devices" section and the logic for that is continuing to improve.  One really cool thing is that you will NOT need to actually stub the devices in all situations (perhaps for Network controllers, but not for USB controllers).  This will allow you to assign a USB controller to a VM and then when the VM is shut down, return that controller to being managed by the host.  Pretty neat, eh?

 

Such a tease...

 

Woo+Rainbow+puke+Found+_3d0e6c2441716226c360df65b0fc1d1a.gif

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Correct.  In 6.2, we will be rendering an "other PCI devices" section and the logic for that is continuing to improve.  One really cool thing is that you will NOT need to actually stub the devices in all situations (perhaps for Network controllers, but not for USB controllers).  This will allow you to assign a USB controller to a VM and then when the VM is shut down, return that controller to being managed by the host.  Pretty neat, eh?

 

Such a tease...

 

Woo+Rainbow+puke+Found+_3d0e6c2441716226c360df65b0fc1d1a.gif

 

I know I can always count on you to be impressed.  There's another cool thing we can do to.  Instead of pci-stub, we will encourage folks with GPUs to use vfio-pci in their syslinux.cfg instead which actually allows GPUs to enter into a slightly lower power state, further saving you $$$.

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I know I can always count on you to be impressed.  There's another cool thing we can do to.  Instead of pci-stub, we will encourage folks with GPUs to use vfio-pci in their syslinux.cfg instead which actually allows GPUs to enter into a slightly lower power state, further saving you $$$.

 

Yes, you can count on that. I am pretty excited, KVM works very well in 6.1 but there are a few things like the USB controller passthrough that I have wished worked a little better and sure enough it is coming! Mostly I really want to recreate my windows 10 vm with omvf but I have decided to wait until 6.2 because of the improvements (you see my windows 10 desktop is getting a little cluttered which equals FORMAT time  ;D).

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I know I can always count on you to be impressed.  There's another cool thing we can do to.  Instead of pci-stub, we will encourage folks with GPUs to use vfio-pci in their syslinux.cfg instead which actually allows GPUs to enter into a slightly lower power state, further saving you $$$.

 

So Jon, when's it coming?.  ;D

 

archedraft? Are we ready for the first forum uprising yet?  ;D

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I'm getting everything to work btw, except one thing!  My PCI sound card is on the same bus as the network card that unRAID chose to use, and they're both in the same IOMMU group :|  So I have to figure this out because that sound card is the one I want to use if possible.

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I actually usually use a USB headset, but I really want to get my sound system hooked up, and this was (is?) a very nice sound card.  I'm actually kind of ehhhh with USB sound cards anyway, because my Logitech headset experiences hiccups and that's turned me off to USB sound devices.  If I knew exactly what was causing it, though, I'd be fine because I'd know I could fix it! :P  anywho, it is something to consider still and I won't rule it out completely!  Thanks!

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