Hello unRAID Community,

 

I am brand new to unRAID and I am very excited to have finally found a storage solution that I like. My system that I currently have does have HVM and IOMMU enabled and the mobo does have onboard graphics. I installed a Windows 10 VM and I am trying to get my EVGA Nvidia GT 210 video card to work with Windows 10. I only have one PCIe x16 slot on the board and I cannot figure out how to set this up. Can someone please help me? Please let me know what other information I need to provide to help solve my issue. Thanks!

 

CrazyCam425

1) Read the VM passthrough Wiki, JonP has done an outstanding job explaining everything you need to know, trust me.

2) Nvidia is not friendly to passthrough when using a single GPU, switch to AMD if you have one laying around....you will not succeed with Nvidia.

3) Make sure your IOMMU groups are broken up with the PCIE ACS Override option found in the VM Manager

4) Investigate if your board properly supports Interrupt remapping. If it doesn't, again, use the workaround contained in the VM wiki.

5) Switch to Seabios-Q35 for your Win10 VM, if nothing's working with OVMF (may require re-installing)

Thank you Jimmy90 for the response. So honestly I won't be able to get my nvidia card working with my setup? What low end AMD card do you recommend that is known to work right out of the box? Something around $100 or less. I don't need anything fancy.

5450 or 6450

Do you think this will work with me only having 1 pcie slot? What is the deal with the top spot only working with unRAID and not VM's?

Your call 

 

https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=43644.0

Thank you very much 

Hi Jimmy90,

I got an MSI AMD 6450 from newegg and it still gives me this error.

Internal error: early end of file from monitor: possible problem:

2016-05-12T22:58:37.895841Z qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0,bus=root.1,addr=00.0,multifunction=on,x-vga=on: vfio: failed to set iommu for container: Operation not permitted

2016-05-12T22:58:37.895872Z qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0,bus=root.1,addr=00.0,multifunction=on,x-vga=on: vfio: failed to setup container for group 11

2016-05-12T22:58:37.895882Z qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0,bus=root.1,addr=00.0,multifunction=on,x-vga=on: vfio: failed to get group 11

2016-05-12T22:58:37.895894Z qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0,bus=root.1,addr=00.0,multifunction=on,x-vga=on: Device initialization failed

2016-05-12T22:58:37.895906Z qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0,bus=root.1,addr=00.0,multifunction=on,x-vga=on: Device 'vfio-pci' could not be initialized

 

I have tried every version and combination of Machine and BIOS for this amd card and cannot get it to work. I have not touched the xml file. and yes hvm and iommu are enabled on my machine. Do you know what I can do to make this work?

So crazy enough I got both cards to work in the system! I used the PCIe override and inserted "vfio_iommu_type1.allow_unsafe_interrupts=1" and it worked! But now I am having a problem with windows not starting up right but i'm going to play with that some and try to fix that. So nvidia cards do work!

Now what I need to know is, using the PCIe override I have read that it could be unsafe and cause data corruption or loss of data. The important question here is, is that the data on that VM or the entire unraid storage array altogether?

So now my problem is that windows runs for about 5 minutes and then the screen goes black and restarts windows into the troubleshooting screen. Any ideas?

The mere fact that you have to workaround your board not supporting Interrupt remapping spells virtualization incompatibility and headaches.

I realize that you are trying to pull a stunt here in making all of this work, but if I were in your shoes, I would just invest an extra 100 on NewEgg and get a board that has two PCI-E slots so that I could use both of my GPUs in a typical Virt fashion (with a descent return on investment might I add).

 

Just curious, have you tried switching to SeaBios? or are you still attempting to make this work with OVMF? Have you reinstalled Win from scratch?

Hi Jimmy,

Yes I did try the different BIOS types and OVMF didn't work either. So basically this is the story now and I have everything working fine. I had to edit the syslinux.cfg file and add the line "vfio_iommu_type1.allow_unsafe_interrupts=1". I was then able to boot windows and use the graphics card. However what i didn't realize is that I didn't have my system set to cache only for the windows install and overnight the cache was moved to the array. So I took a look at the syslinux.cfg file again and the line I added is now gone and everything still works no problem and I can add new vm's and it still works. So at this point I would say that I'm not really using a work around anymore. The interesting part of this whole process is, I now can use my amd or nvidia card with no problems. Whereas I thought it to be impossible to use any nvidia card on the motherboard with only 1 pcie slot. So no complaints from me but I going to just keep using my new amd card. Also, I've been reading that when 6.2 comes out the onboard graphics would be useable for unraid. Would that fix my original issue anyways so that other users who are having trouble with nvidia cards and 1 pcie slot will then be able to use their cards?

That's a very good question! But I'm afraid I don't have the savvy answer for it.

Perhaps JonP or someone else with equal Qemu-KVM wisdom will jump in to provide some guidance on the matter.