Intel IGD (integrated graphics) Pass Through Support - March 2016 Update


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Any thoughts on @gridrunner comment @jonp?

Interesting, but doesn't change our recommendations. When Linus did the gaming + NAS video (not 2 gamers or 7), he had a skylake system and the ACS override didn't work for him. Luck of the draw on the hardware I guess.

 

Certainly doesn't change anything with respect to igd pass through support.

 

@JonP  Yeah bit the he got the gpu passed through(it was only the onboard sound he couldnt pass through).

I think if you say skylake isnt compatable with unraid, or not recommended for gpu passthrough, it may put alot of people off choosing to try or purchase unraid, as many people may not want to buy older hardware when building a new rig.

There have been quite a few of us who have built our unraid rigs with skylake, and many people using kvm with passthough on other linux distros.

Why dont you make a section with pros and cons of each main type of cpu. I realise that its hard for you to test everything and expensive, but this would help people deceide what to buy and what to expect.

You guys official online manual on the wiki is for 4.7! I know it takes time updating the website (and i would far rather have you guys improving unraid and getting us our 6.2 soon!)

Anyway thanks for all your hardwork you do for us.

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Any thoughts on @gridrunner comment @jonp?

Interesting, but doesn't change our recommendations. When Linus did the gaming + NAS video (not 2 gamers or 7), he had a skylake system and the ACS override didn't work for him. Luck of the draw on the hardware I guess.

 

Certainly doesn't change anything with respect to igd pass through support.

 

@JonP  Yeah bit the he got the gpu passed through(it was only the onboard sound he couldnt pass through).

I think if you say skylake isnt compatable with unraid, or not recommended for gpu passthrough, it may put alot of people off choosing to try or purchase unraid, as many people may not want to buy older hardware when building a new rig.

There have been quite a few of us who have built our unraid rigs with skylake, and many people using kvm with passthough on other linux distros.

Why dont you make a section with pros and cons of each main type of cpu. I realise that its hard for you to test everything and expensive, but this would help people deceide what to buy and what to expect.

You guys official online manual on the wiki is for 4.7! I know it takes time updating the website (and i would far rather have you guys improving unraid and getting us our 6.2 soon!)

Anyway thanks for all your hardwork you do for us.

 

Have to agree with gridrunner here. Was composing my next build for quite a while and almost went with Haswell simply because hardware passthrough was not supposed to work properly on Skylake. Luckily stumbled upon a few success stories, meaning the architecture itself is not unsupported per se.

Perhaps marking Skylake as supported with caveats would be better and adding working cpu-mobo-gpu combinations to the supported hardware list?

 

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I think the deal is this (speaking on your topic of Skylake):

 

Most hardware is compatible with UnRAID, but there are caveats to each, and not everything is perfect.

If we all want to have "servers" we should all have ECC memory, and Xeon's, or equivalent.

However a lot of people don't, and are very happy with their setups.

 

Skylake being the newest shiniest Intel architecture is definitely supported, however with all new hardware you're likely to be ahead of the curve at times with support in the kernel, drivers, etc..

If you're running multiple VM's, you're also likely to have an issue with IOMMU grouping.

The ACS override patch is just that, a patch, and from what I understand will not go upstream in the Linux kernel, as it is not a recommended thing to enable (yes, you're likely fine, BUT that doesn't mean it may not cause issues), there is a reason you get that annoying warning in the log, and on the system devices page.

Tell Intel to add ACS on root ports, and Skylake will likely be the new recommended "desktop" processor for KVM/QEMU.

However unfortunately it doesn't, and for that reason the recommended (cover most bases) is i7 "E", or Xeon E5.

I can't see that stance changing without the hardware changing, and the recommendation when a primary part of the recommendation is using vt-d and virtualization.

 

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I think the deal is this (speaking on your topic of Skylake):

 

Most hardware is compatible with UnRAID, but there are caveats to each, and not everything is perfect.

If we all want to have "servers" we should all have ECC memory, and Xeon's, or equivalent.

However a lot of people don't, and are very happy with their setups.

 

Skylake being the newest shiniest Intel architecture is definitely supported, however with all new hardware you're likely to be ahead of the curve at times with support in the kernel, drivers, etc..

If you're running multiple VM's, you're also likely to have an issue with IOMMU grouping.

The ACS override patch is just that, a patch, and from what I understand will not go upstream in the Linux kernel, as it is not a recommended thing to enable (yes, you're likely fine, BUT that doesn't mean it may not cause issues), there is a reason you get that annoying warning in the log, and on the system devices page.

Tell Intel to add ACS on root ports, and Skylake will likely be the new recommended "desktop" processor for KVM/QEMU.

However unfortunately it doesn't, and for that reason the recommended (cover most bases) is i7 "E", or Xeon E5.

I can't see that stance changing without the hardware changing, and the recommendation when a primary part of the recommendation is using vt-d and virtualization.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

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Not sure if that was posted already but take a look here: http://vfio.blogspot.com/2016/07/intel-graphics-assignment.html

 

If I'm reading it right but iGPU pass-through seems to be possible. Also "I've been told this works with Skylake" makes me kind of happy since I have i7-6700K and it would be nice to be able to put that iGPU to some work more serious than just showing webui from time to time.

 

So should it work on current unRaid version (I run 6.2.0.rc2) or that article is only applicable for "normal" linux systems?

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Not sure if that was posted already but take a look here: http://vfio.blogspot.com/2016/07/intel-graphics-assignment.html

 

If I'm reading it right but iGPU pass-through seems to be possible. Also "I've been told this works with Skylake" makes me kind of happy since I have i7-6700K and it would be nice to be able to put that iGPU to some work more serious than just showing webui from time to time.

 

So should it work on current unRaid version (I run 6.2.0.rc2) or that article is only applicable for "normal" linux systems?

The RC is using QEMU 2.5.1 so it will not work yet. For this to work QEMU 2.7  (which is not released yet) has to be added in unraid.

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The RC is using QEMU 2.5.1 so it will not work yet. For this to work QEMU 2.7  (which is not released yet) has to be added in unraid.

 

Ah, little detail I missed. Oh well, let's hope it will be released and pulled into unraid in some near-ish future. Would be one less thing to duplicate when you want / need to run 2 VMs with real hardware.

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Based on QEMU's track history, 2.7 should be out sometime in August.  We have every intention of continuing to maintain support for QEMU/KVM in unRAID, but know that in addition to QEMU needing to support this, libvirt will as well.  There will likely be a small time-gap between when QEMU 2.7 is released and when libvirt support for IGD assignment will be there.  The bottom line here is that we definitely want to support this as a feature in unRAID when it's available and ready for prime time.

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The RC is using QEMU 2.5.1 so it will not work yet. For this to work QEMU 2.7  (which is not released yet) has to be added in unraid.

 

Ah, little detail I missed. Oh well, let's hope it will be released and pulled into unraid in some near-ish future. Would be one less thing to duplicate when you want / need to run 2 VMs with real hardware.

 

QEMU 2.7 is out now , will this be implemented  in  6.2.0-rc6 ?

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The RC is using QEMU 2.5.1 so it will not work yet. For this to work QEMU 2.7  (which is not released yet) has to be added in unraid.

 

Ah, little detail I missed. Oh well, let's hope it will be released and pulled into unraid in some near-ish future. Would be one less thing to duplicate when you want / need to run 2 VMs with real hardware.

 

QEMU 2.7 is out now , will this be implemented  in  6.2.0-rc6 ?

Not likely. There would be a lot of complaints if they put this major change into a release candidate. Expect to go to the next beta cycle before this is added.
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We have plans to incorporate QEMU 2.7 into the next release of unRAID.

 

will this also allow passthrough of the first PCI slot if no GPU?  I 'managed' to do this over the weekend for my new unRAID machine with a HD6450, but it wasn't 100% stable and occasionally I'd see the unRAID interface appear as a flickering shadow on the screen.

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  • 2 weeks later...

We have plans to incorporate QEMU 2.7 into the next release of unRAID.

 

will this also allow passthrough of the first PCI slot if no GPU?  I 'managed' to do this over the weekend for my new unRAID machine with a HD6450, but it wasn't 100% stable and occasionally I'd see the unRAID interface appear as a flickering shadow on the screen.

 

If anyone is interested and reads this in the future, I fixed the ghosting by not booting to the unRAID GUI and I can pass my ATI card through as hoped.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is IGD passthrough as easy as just creating a new VM with the IGD video and audio and starting it?

I'm wondering whether there is anything simple in the BIOS, boot params or unRAID settings (eg. CPU Pinning) I might have missed.

 

I currently run a Win10 VM with PCI-E ASUS R7-240 passthrough (all Logical CPUs ticked).

And I'm trying to add a second VM using IGD, but getting no video via motherboard HDMI output on startup. I set up the VM using VNC, then switched to IGD (after installing TeamViewer so I could still remote into it), but, while Win10 detected the HD Graphics 4600 and installed the drivers, Device Manager reports the hardware as not working, from memory with error code 32.

 

My rig is a ASRock H97M-Pro4 Motherboard and i5-4460.

 

Any ideas?

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Solved it myself. Just re-read the first post, says to use SeaBIOS. I've been selecting OVMF by default.

 

Created a new VM with SeaBIOS and all good.  :)

 

Is IGD passthrough as easy as just creating a new VM with the IGD video and audio and starting it?

I'm wondering whether there is anything simple in the BIOS, boot params or unRAID settings (eg. CPU Pinning) I might have missed.

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