So if you have an Asus X58 Mobo and ever attempted to run VMs you will see that despite VT-d being enabled in the bios that the VM can not access devices through the IOMMU directly.

 

Rumor is there is a magical unreleased/modded bios that fix the DMAR Tables, essentially unRAID/XEN/any other Virtulization software shuts down IOMMU/VT-d... saying in the log BIOS Broken RMRR ends before it starts.  

 

I have an Asus P6T (original not deluxe, ws, se or any thing else) that has the latest and not greatest AMI (American Megatrends Inc.) Bios # 1408 (released September of 2010)

 

Rumor on the Xen Wiki and in some other places is that the DMAR Tables have been fixed in this BIOS.  I am either attempting to find it or if someone smart enough knows how to mod it and fix the DMAR Tables and RMRR issue (says Mapping reserved region failed)

 

Quite a long shot I know, but based on my searches I am not the only person in the world looking for a solution to this error.  The broken Bios affects VT-d usage in any distro using x58 on AMI Bios.

 

Note:  The broken DMAR Tables seems to mainly affect the integrated sound card and appears to span beyond this series of boards with the AMI Bios being the common denominator.  I found one post stating do not include the integrated audio when setting up the VM, rather add a card via USB.  May be true in some instances, for me the VM crashes shortly after booting.  Besides I dont want multiple call trace errors on my server.

 

Any help or a nudge in the right direction is greatly appreciated.

Edited September 5, 20178 yr by 88pockets
magically to magical. I dont think it was magically unrelased, instead the Bios is magical and has not been released to the public (lol)

I also have this issue. If someone has the bios mentioned it would be greatly appreciated.

On 10/29/2019 at 6:41 PM, dsfgsdfg said:

I also have this issue. If someone has the bios mentioned it would be greatly appreciated.

Hey bud, I think this is an issue that won't be fixed. Unfortunately the P6T is a good board for LGA 1366 and utilizing the Xeon X5600 series in a consumer board, but VM with HW passthrough just wont work.  I'd suggest selling the board or whole platform and going on reddit/r/homelabsales and finding a true server grade solution for your unRAID rig.  I sold my P6T and got a 12 3.5" SuperMicro chassis and Motherboard to serve as my unRAID machine.  Good news X58 Mobos fetch a good price.  

 

unRAID is a cool place to start with VMs, but there are a bunch of other distros to check out Proxmox, XCP-ng (XenServer), ESXi (VMware), check em all out, its all free.  Or if you get two GPUs, you can check out r/VFIO and pass through a GPU from a linux host to Windows or MacOS.  Theres a ton of stuff to learn