USB PCIE passthrough fresco issues.

[dathomas85]

Hi there just need some advice I’ve searched but haven’t really found the answers to what I’m looking for.

 

So I’m running unraid and all is good. I have a VM setup passing through my gpu and nvme drive which is all good I got a PCIe usb card didn’t research before hand and it’s a fresco card. When trying to pass through it hangs my vm on boot.

 

I used pcie_acs_overide=is:cardID for the acs patch I’ve also tried setting the acs to both downstream and multifunction in VM manger and then put the vfio-ids instead but each time my system hangs on the boot if I remove the controller from my vm it boots fine. 
 

Another way I was thinking of doing this now as I’ve been reading the forums is to place my unraid usb on the controller and then passthrough the boards controllers instead which I initially done in Linux before I decided to get the controller and restart my server with unraid would this cause an issue with unraid or would unraid boot nicely from the controller then just passthrough the rest of my onboard controllers through to the VM

 

sorry for the long winded explanation I’m currently away from the computer so can’t show my xml for the VM etc till later just hoping someone may be able to help abit

 

thanks in advance.

Edited December 28, 2019 by dathomas85
Typos

[scorcho99]

You won't be able to boot unraid from the controller*, typically USB boot requires the controller to be tied into the bios and only onboard controllers do that. Theoretically some one could make a USB controller with a boot ram on it but I have never seen or heard of one. Probably your best bet is to just buy another USB card that works better.

 

*If you were really desperate and had enough USB keys lying around, it might be possible to use plop boot loader to make this work. plop lets you boot USB devices from normally unbootable controllers with the caveats that you must boot plop itself first somehow and that the USB connection during boot is brutally slow.

[JonathanM]

9 hours ago, scorcho99 said:

You won't be able to boot unraid from the controller*, typically USB boot requires the controller to be tied into the bios and only onboard controllers do that. Theoretically some one could make a USB controller with a boot ram on it but I have never seen or heard of one. Probably your best bet is to just buy another USB card that works better.

 

*If you were really desperate and had enough USB keys lying around, it might be possible to use plop boot loader to make this work. plop lets you boot USB devices from normally unbootable controllers with the caveats that you must boot plop itself first somehow and that the USB connection during boot is brutally slow.

UEFI has changed that somewhat. I have seen anecdotal evidence that some motherboards can parse through some addon USB controller cards to boot UEFI. It would be a matter of trial and error. Lots of error. Maybe a success here and there. Getting it to work reliably with Unraid? Probably not.