Sound passthrough issues (onboard and PCIe card)

[Helly]

Hello everyone,

 

Been having mostly successes with unraid so far but passing through sound keeps giving me problems. I've tried to search for this problem all over but i only get topics without reactions or no reactions to it when someone posts it. Which is not giving me much hope of fixing the problem of passing through my soundcard.. but here it goes anyway. This is the error i get:

 

qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.0,id=hostdev1,bus=pci.2,addr=0x4: vfio: msix_init failed
qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.0,id=hostdev1,bus=pci.2,addr=0x4: vfio: 0000:02:00.0 Error adding PCI capability 0x11[0x53]@0xac: -22
qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.0,id=hostdev1,bus=pci.2,addr=0x4: Device initialization failed

 

The card is a Asus Xonar Phoebus. I tried the ACS override, using the different bios things (q35, i440), i also tried the CFG edit with the unsafe thing (sorry i can't remember the names of all these fixes, been trying a lot of them, so plz forgive me for that.).

 

I've also been trying to pass through the onboard audio, that works somewhat but the audio is all messed up and not really usable. I'm not even sure what to call it but the underwater sound i read in some places here comes close. When i try to game with that sound it just crashes the game after about a min. I tried the MSI tool and that seems to have fixed the crashing and made it less underwater sounding but its still all messed up and unusable.

 

I really need a fix for either of these problems (i'd prefer a fix for both but ill settle for one fix.)

 

SPECS:

AMD Phenom2 x6 1090t

Gigabyte 990fx UD7

16GB DDR3

256GB Vertex4 SSD(cache)

2x WB Black 1TB (parity + disk)

2x AMD 7970GHZ edition

Asus Xonar Phoebus

Corsair RM850x PSU

 

Using UnRAID v6.2.2

HVM and IOMMU are both enabled

 

This is my first time using unraid and im still in the trial period so i don't quite know what else to mention about this.

[jonp]

Unfortunately it appears the bulk of your issues are stemming from your hardware.  AMD hardware is known to be far more problematic, especially with GPU pass through.  I don't know what sort of on-board audio device is used on that (realtek or otherwise), but if you had an Intel-based system, you wouldn't be having problems passing through on-board audio (it's what I do on a daily basis).  What I would first suggest is switching to an NVIDIA-based GPU, as that alone may solve all your issues (as you could use HDMI audio with the NVIDIA card after applying the MSI registry tweak and you'll be good to go).

 

 

[Helly]

Unfortunately the only hardware that is giving me NO issues are the GPU's. The HDMI audio is working 100%, it's also not what i'm trying to use. I only have 1 monitor which i can use sound through HDMI on so i need another audio device to get audio on the 2nd VM. If i had any problems with the GPU i would have mentioned it .

 

The problems i mentioned are the only problems i'm having right now. If the onboard audio issue lies with the AMD hardware i can live with that, is there a solution to the audio card problem then? If it helps, everything is on separate groups.

[jonp]

Unfortunately the only hardware that is giving me NO issues are the GPU's. The HDMI audio is working 100%, it's also not what i'm trying to use. I only have 1 monitor which i can use sound through HDMI on so i need another audio device to get audio on the 2nd VM. If i had any problems with the GPU i would have mentioned it .

 

The problems i mentioned are the only problems i'm having right now. If the onboard audio issue lies with the AMD hardware i can live with that, is there a solution to the audio card problem then? If it helps, everything is on separate groups.

 

Ah, you didn't attach your system diagnostics so I couldn't review the actual hardware that was having the issue.  The sound card is likely just another device that doesn't support virtualization very well.  Honestly I think it's pretty rare nowadays for folks to use a discrete PCI audio card, but I can definitely see where this may pick up in the future.  Perhaps there is some latency with the device or something else going on, but it's difficult to say without diagnostics and a log.  What we can do is submit your diagnostics upstream to the VFIO project (that's what enables PCI device assignment in KVM, virtualization platform used in unRAID), and see if they can help diagnose.

 

Another question for you is whether or not the VM will even start with Asus card assigned and if so, what issues you experience.  If it won't even start, that's one thing, but if it starts with an error, we need more info from within the Guest OS to determine what its seeing once the VM is fully booted.

 

Also, with respect to the "underwater" problem with sound in Windows when passing through the on-board device, you may want to check your audio settings to see if Windows has them set to 5.1 surround vs. stereo.  That is usually the problem and a quick switch will fix that.

[saarg]

My advice is to forget the Xonar card.  No one in here have got it working. There are a couple of threads about it.

[Helly]

 

Another question for you is whether or not the VM will even start with Asus card assigned and if so, what issues you experience.  If it won't even start, that's one thing, but if it starts with an error, we need more info from within the Guest OS to determine what its seeing once the VM is fully booted.

 

Also, with respect to the "underwater" problem with sound in Windows when passing through the on-board device, you may want to check your audio settings to see if Windows has them set to 5.1 surround vs. stereo.  That is usually the problem and a quick switch will fix that.

 

The VM won't start at all with the asus card assigned. I get the error in the OP right after i try to start it with the card assigned. It comes along with a list of "host doesn't support requested feature" with CPUID's. Which at this point im guessing is a standard error since i've seen it with all the errors i've had so far.

 

The underwater problem seems to be the wrong description then. It has always been set to stereo and i suppose a better description would be crackling and distorted. It just sounded slowed down before and kinda sounded like being underwater. But now its just distorted and crackling all over the place. If it even works in a game that is, it also drops out a lot. Then i will have no sound until i quit the game and try to play a sound in windows itself, like spamming the volume slider.

 

i've attached the diagnostics and log. I hope its the right one

unhelly-diagnostics-20161112-0053.zip

unhelly-syslog-20161112-0054.zip

[Helly]

Any more idea's for things i can try to get this working right? The onboard audio is a realtek ALC889 btw.

 

In trying a few more things i ran into an unrelated but annoying problem. Windows failed to boot a couple of times and now keeps asking to fix the startup. I'm given the option to just continue to boot windows which im thinking would work but my keyboard doesn't respond during boot. So i can only choose the option to fix the startup. Which doesn't work. So i'm stuck right now and unable to boot the OS. Is there a way to get the keyboard to respond during boot? If not, ill just recreate the VM and reinstall but it would be nice to fix the issue.

[KeeNuM23]

On 11/11/2016 at 11:33 AM, jonp said:

Unfortunately it appears the bulk of your issues are stemming from your hardware.  AMD hardware is known to be far more problematic, especially with GPU pass through.  I don't know what sort of on-board audio device is used on that (realtek or otherwise), but if you had an Intel-based system, you wouldn't be having problems passing through on-board audio (it's what I do on a daily basis).  What I would first suggest is switching to an NVIDIA-based GPU, as that alone may solve all your issues (as you could use HDMI audio with the NVIDIA card after applying the MSI registry tweak and you'll be good to go).

 

 

Do you have a link to the MSI tweak? My 1080 audio from hdmi cable sounds horrible. Running win10 VM.

[Squid]

15 hours ago, KeeNuM23 said:

Do you have a link to the MSI tweak?

https://wiki.unraid.net/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#Enable_MSI_for_Interrupts_to_Fix_HDMI_Audio_Support

[SpaceInvaderOne]

Try this  prog. Run as administrator and select your gpu and all sound devices and then reboot the vm and you will have angelic sound as opposed to demonic sound !   ...well hopefully!

 

MSI_util.zip