I have recently built an unRAID system, I was successful in pasingthrough AMD HD6450 card and that VM is happily running Windows 10 and I am able to update the VGA driver from device manager. The VM manager made the process very easy, though I have failed to passthrough an NVIDIA 560Ti hence I went out and got the HD 6450.

 

As this build was mainly for photo editing, I bought an AMD firepro w7100 card, unfortunately I am struggling with it. I can get it to activate my 4K monitor uing windows basic drivers but when I go to update to use Firepro drivers the system crashes in the middle of installation or if I do make it to the end, the VM boots to a blank screen. I would really appreciate some help.

 

MB - Asus Z10PE D16 WS

2 x Xeon E5 2630 V3

64 GB Kingston DDR4 ECC registered RAM

Sandisk 960GB SSD cache drive

4 x 4TB HGT NAS drives

 

PCIE 1 is taken up by AMD HD6450

PCIE 2 is empty

PCIE 3 is taken up by AMD Firepro W7100

PCIE 4 is taken up by Lycom DT120 NVME adaptor with Samsung 512GB 950 pro

PCIE 5 is taken up by NVIDIA 560Ti

PCIE 6 is empty

 

Power is supplied by Corsair AX1500i - so I don't think lack of power is an issue.

 

 

 

As nobody has answered this, I have finally managed to figure out how to do it. The HD6450 card was a breeze to do using SEABIOS and i440fx, it works very well and is how I thought unRAID would work.

 

The Firepro W7100 was a dog in comparison, after wasted days and a lot of hair pulling I finally realised what was happening and made some changes. The Firepro will only work with OVMF & i440fx, you must set up the VM and do all the software installation via VNC, once everything is set power off the VM and then re-edit and use OVMF & i440fx, this way you can assign as many cores and memory as you wish (I have 16 cores & 32G RAM). When you start up the VM you can then update the driver via device manager.

 

The only issue with this card and possibly similar Radeon cards is that when you stop the VM it will not reset the card, so when you restart you get a black screen. At this point on many occasions I thought it had crashed, but it hasn't. You will need to force stop the VM and switch to VNC. You will then see the UEFI boot screen, what you need to do is type exit and go to boot menu, from there choose boot device and highlight other device and it will boot up into windows 10 normally. Then just use windows to shut the VM down and re-edit the VM to use the GPU once more, this time when it starts, the GPU starts up and everything is normal again.

 

I am sure there are scripts out there to automate this, but I am not a programmer and I am just happy to have a functional VM which utilises the full power of the firepro and  can run at 4K.

 

I have also managed to use LACP which has nearly doubled my transfer rate from 40-60MB/s to over 110MB/s, which is extremely useful for large video and photo images.

 

I hope this helps anyone that has struggled like me with these Firepro cards.

 

<domain type='kvm' id='3'>

  <name>Tuan 10</name>

  <uuid>e66559aa-092f-b006-1486-d5fa01e45ac9</uuid>

  <metadata>

    <vmtemplate name="Custom" icon="windows.png" os="windows"/>

  </metadata>

  <memory unit='KiB'>33554432</memory>

  <currentMemory unit='KiB'>33554432</currentMemory>

  <memoryBacking>

    <nosharepages/>

    <locked/>

  </memoryBacking>

  <vcpu placement='static'>16</vcpu>

  <cputune>

    <vcpupin vcpu='0' cpuset='0'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='1' cpuset='1'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='2' cpuset='2'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='3' cpuset='3'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='4' cpuset='4'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='5' cpuset='5'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='6' cpuset='6'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='7' cpuset='7'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='8' cpuset='8'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='9' cpuset='9'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='10' cpuset='10'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='11' cpuset='11'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='12' cpuset='12'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='13' cpuset='13'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='14' cpuset='14'/>

    <vcpupin vcpu='15' cpuset='15'/>

  </cputune>

  <resource>

    <partition>/machine</partition>

  </resource>

  <os>

    <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-i440fx-2.3'>hvm</type>

    <loader type='pflash'>/usr/share/qemu/ovmf-x64/OVMF-pure-efi.fd</loader>

  </os>

  <features>

    <acpi/>

    <apic/>

    <hyperv>

      <relaxed state='on'/>

      <vapic state='on'/>

      <spinlocks state='on' retries='8191'/>

    </hyperv>

  </features>

  <cpu mode='host-passthrough'>

    <topology sockets='1' cores='16' threads='1'/>

  </cpu>

  <clock offset='localtime'>

    <timer name='hypervclock' present='yes'/>

    <timer name='hpet' present='no'/>

  </clock>

  <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>

  <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>

  <on_crash>restart</on_crash>

  <devices>

    <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64</emulator>

    <disk type='file' device='disk'>

      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>

      <source file='/mnt/user/vdisks/Tuan 10/vdisk1.img'/>

      <backingStore/>

      <target dev='hdc' bus='virtio'/>

      <boot order='1'/>

      <alias name='virtio-disk2'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x04' function='0x0'/>

    </disk>

    <disk type='file' device='disk'>

      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>

      <source file='/mnt/user/ArrayVdisks/Tuan 10/vdisk2.img'/>

      <backingStore/>

      <target dev='hdd' bus='virtio'/>

      <alias name='virtio-disk3'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/>

    </disk>

    <disk type='file' device='cdrom'>

      <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>

      <source file='/mnt/user/ISOs/Win10_1511_English_x64.iso'/>

      <backingStore/>

      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>

      <readonly/>

      <boot order='2'/>

      <alias name='ide0-0-0'/>

      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>

    </disk>

    <disk type='file' device='cdrom'>

      <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>

      <source file='/mnt/user/ISOs/virtio-win-0.1.110.iso'/>

      <backingStore/>

      <target dev='hdb' bus='ide'/>

      <readonly/>

      <alias name='ide0-0-1'/>

      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='1'/>

    </disk>

    <controller type='usb' index='0'>

      <alias name='usb'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x2'/>

    </controller>

    <controller type='pci' index='0' model='pci-root'>

      <alias name='pci.0'/>

    </controller>

    <controller type='ide' index='0'>

      <alias name='ide'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x1'/>

    </controller>

    <controller type='virtio-serial' index='0'>

      <alias name='virtio-serial0'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x0'/>

    </controller>

    <interface type='bridge'>

      <mac address='52:54:00:ac:25:bb'/>

      <source bridge='br0'/>

      <target dev='vnet1'/>

      <model type='virtio'/>

      <alias name='net0'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/>

    </interface>

    <serial type='pty'>

      <source path='/dev/pts/1'/>

      <target port='0'/>

      <alias name='serial0'/>

    </serial>

    <console type='pty' tty='/dev/pts/1'>

      <source path='/dev/pts/1'/>

      <target type='serial' port='0'/>

      <alias name='serial0'/>

    </console>

    <channel type='unix'>

      <source mode='bind' path='/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/channel/target/Tuan 10.org.qemu.guest_agent.0'/>

      <target type='virtio' name='org.qemu.guest_agent.0' state='connected'/>

      <alias name='channel0'/>

      <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>

    </channel>

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>

      <driver name='vfio'/>

      <source>

        <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x01' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>

      </source>

      <alias name='hostdev0'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/>

    </hostdev>

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>

      <driver name='vfio'/>

      <source>

        <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x01' slot='0x00' function='0x1'/>

      </source>

      <alias name='hostdev1'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x0'/>

    </hostdev>

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>

      <source>

        <vendor id='0x05dc'/>

        <product id='0xb049'/>

        <address bus='4' device='6'/>

      </source>

      <alias name='hostdev2'/>

    </hostdev>

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>

      <source>

        <vendor id='0x0bda'/>

        <product id='0x0307'/>

        <address bus='3' device='14'/>

      </source>

      <alias name='hostdev3'/>

    </hostdev>

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>

      <source>

        <vendor id='0x056a'/>

        <product id='0x0027'/>

        <address bus='3' device='8'/>

      </source>

      <alias name='hostdev4'/>

    </hostdev>

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>

      <source>

        <vendor id='0x1b1c'/>

        <product id='0x1b20'/>

        <address bus='3' device='3'/>

      </source>

      <alias name='hostdev5'/>

    </hostdev>

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>

      <source>

        <vendor id='0x045e'/>

        <product id='0x0748'/>

        <address bus='3' device='13'/>

      </source>

      <alias name='hostdev6'/>

    </hostdev>

    <memballoon model='virtio'>

      <alias name='balloon0'/>

      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x08' function='0x0'/>

    </memballoon>

  </devices>

</domain>

A workaround that might help when rebooting is to eject the card from the VM before rebooting. Use the safe removal of devices to do it, if it's windows.

Will give that a go too, thank you Saarg