IOMMU: Disabled in unRAID on Gen8 Microserver but VT-d enabled in BIOS

[wipwar]

Hi All,

 

I have been following Spaceinvader's guide to installing pfSense and have run into a brick wall.

 

unRAID is reporting that IOMMU is disabled in the UI, so I cannot pass my dedicated 4 port NIC through to the pfSense VM

 

I have been going through forums all day now and although there is a lot of talk about the Gen8 and Hardware pass through, nothing talks about IOMMU being disabled.

 

I've attached a picture of my BIOS Information, VT-d Enabled, No Other PCI Devices being available to pfSense, System Information and the IOMMU info I added to my syslinux.cfg to stop unRAID from using the quad NIC.

 

I am running the latest version of unRAID, Gen8 BIOS and iLO4 and the quad NIC card was pulled from a working device.

Can anyone help me? Have I missed something obvious?

 

Cheers,

wip

[eschultz]

Your CPU (Intel Celeron G1610T) doesn't support VT-d even though the motherboard does: https://ark.intel.com/products/71074/Intel-Celeron-Processor-G1610T-2M-Cache-2_30-GHz

 

[wipwar]

21 minutes ago, eschultz said:

Your CPU (Intel Celeron G1610T) doesn't support VT-d even though the motherboard does: https://ark.intel.com/products/71074/Intel-Celeron-Processor-G1610T-2M-Cache-2_30-GHz

 

Thanks for that! Game over then.

[John_M]

5 hours ago, wipwar said:

Thanks for that! Game over then.

 

You could upgrade your processor. There are a handful of Xeon options that you could use. I put a Sandy Bridge E3-1260L in one of my Gen8s. They're discontinued but available used on eBay. It has a higher TDP (45 W) than the Celeron (35 W) but in practice there are no real issues - the fan may run faster. If you want to play safe the E3-1220L has an even lower TDP (20 W) than the Celeron but it's performance is consequently quite feeble. Another option is the slightly newer Ivy Bridge E3-1265L v2, which allows slightly faster RAM (1600 MHz vs 1333 MHz) and has slightly better performance than the 1260L. It has the same 45 W TDP but costs somewhat more. Any of these would allow you to use IOMMU and all support ECC RAM. There are a number of guides on the Internet.

[wipwar]

11 hours ago, John_M said:

If you want to play safe the E3-1220L has an even lower TDP (20 W) than the Celeron but it's performance is consequently quite feeble.

Thanks for the info!

I'm going to buy an E3-1220L V2 for $115 AUD. Passmark on my current CPU vs the 1220L is 2304 to 4419. So nearly double the performance.

I am not noticing any CPU problems at the moment running a few dockers and a Win2016 server so I think the 1220L will be more than enough.

Do you think adding a pfSense VM to the mix will push the 1220L to the limit? I have about 15 devices on the LAN, no VPN, 50Mb connection. pfSense would be DHCP, DNS, standard network services.

[John_M]

The one I know for certain that works is the original Sandy Bridge E3-1220L, not the Ivy Bridge E3-1220L v2 that you mention, though I can see no reason why it would not work. It's just that the version 1 was sold as an option by HP. The v2 has an even lower TDP (17 W). To me these 2-core/4-thread Xeons didn't offer value for money as upgrades but if you're otherwise happy with your existing Celeron (it is surprisingly capable!) then you'll be fine with the 1220L. I don't use pfSense but I wouldn't expect it to be a heavy CPU user. You'll probably be fine. Good luck. There's a maintenance manual available online that shows an exploded view of the Microserver. It's useful to know what needs to be disconnected from the motherboard before the tray can slide out.

[Corodeanu N]

i have the seme problem 

Model: HP ProLiant G6 SE326M1

M/B: Version - s/n:

BIOS: HP Version R02. Dated: 07/02/2013

CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Disabled

Cache: 192 KiB, 192 KiB, 1536 KiB, 1536 KiB, 12288 KiB, 12288 KiB

Memory: 32 GiB DDR3 Single-bit ECC (max. installable capacity 384 GiB)

Network: bond0: IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation, mtu 1500
 eth0: 1000 Mbps, full duplex, mtu 1500
 eth1: 1000 Mbps, full duplex, mtu 1500

Kernel: Linux 4.19.94-Unraid x86_64

OpenSSL: 1.1.1d

 

[1812]

you could start by updating your bios

[John_M]

4 hours ago, Corodeanu N said:

i have the seme problem

Actually, you don't. The OP's CPU doesn't support VT-d but yours does. You need to enable IOMMU in the BIOS.

[Corodeanu N]

lol update bios .. i can't find any bios update for my hp server SE326M1r2