My experience with Linux Vm's so far + help needed

[ieronymous]

Hello once again

   After a lot of installations and VM removals as well I d like to share some things I found weird

I am using Unraid Ver 6.8.3 in a Dell  T7600 workstation with dual zeon E5-2667 and 64GB ECC ram.

I tried popOS, Linux Mint, Ubuntu (all derives from debian if I can recall). Anyway....

All Vm's made with the classic options like Q35-4.2, OVMF, Vdisk as VirtIO ans RAW and finally passing through an AMD GPU rx570/4GB Polaris (first time in the red field)

I also tried Win10 VM passing through the AMD Gpu and an SSD for the installation and the only thing went wrong were the 440 emulation chipset. With that chip set during Adrenaline installation blank screen  and that s it. Nothing I could do afterwards.  I destroyed the VM and changed the chip set to Q35 and seemed to work fine  with AMD, Probably with a green card the 440 chip set should work.

 

   Going back to Linux VM's again, started with 4 cores and 8gb ram and  VNC and all distro's installation went smoothly. I tried to install splashtop client streemer  but unfortunately that was only for ubuntu 18.04. Anyway dont forget the first thing to do after installation and sudo apt update && dist-upgrade to install openssh-server and maybe set a static IP at the same time before rebooting in order to be able to shut down the OS properly if something happens (and with gpu pass through IT WILL happen). After updates shut down PopOS and tried to pass through the GPU and the audio part of course along with a wireless logitech keyboard with mousepad combo. And there it was .....  a black screen. Forced shutdown and reboot the Unraid and tried a couple of times / cables(HDMI) with no success. I also added thje vbios gpu but nothing. Changes back to VNC and it worked only once after that in each reboot I had a black screen with host dint initialize gpu or something like that. As I had read earlier possible problems I had already installed the script for resetting the gpu. Also tried with 1 core / 2 cores, lower memory but nothing, So destroyed VM and tried Linux Mint. Exactly the same behavior as PopOS . After passing through the GPU black screen. And here comes the first question

1. Was there a way to pre install amd open source drivers before switching to the passedthrough gpu? And how these drivers are installed? I ve read somewhere that from Kernel 5.0+ the drivers are baked in the kernel (and I was using the latest distros with kernel ver 5.3 or 5.4)

 

   Final attempt was to start the Linux Mint VM with the gpu/audio passed -through from the very start and the keyboard of course. That's when it got interested. To my surprise I saw the installation screen but even though passed the wireless keyboard I could t choose the next screen because the keyboard couldn't be recognized. To make the long story short I believe that was because  I had the Unraid boot in UEFI mode so the keyboard was in legacy mode probably and couldn't be recognized until the OS starts. And we move on to the second question

2. How can you change the Unraid mode from UEFI to MBR/Legacy without re installing Unraid from scratch?

 

   At the end gave PopOS a final try with the same parameters as   Mint meaning to pass through the gpu from the start and dont begin with VNC graphics. To tell you the truth i dont believe Unraid is so tolerable to change the gpu adapter from actual gpu to vnc and vice versa. At least for me it didnt work either with stuck OS or black screen and message Host didnt initialized gpu adapter yet. Anyway .... I was lucky and PopOS dont want from the user to press something to continue and auto loads to the OS and from there you can install it. That made the trick because when it loaded I had keyboard/mouse movement and I was able to finish installation. Everything worked fine, updated all packages...etc. Problem with that procedure was . I wasn't able afterwards to change anything in the VM from the gui interface.Each change led to greyd out menus and of course no changes kept. I was only able to change memory - cores from  xml view. All other VM's created with the VNC way worked ok with me changing things from the gui view. 3.Anyone has any thoughts why this happens? And follows a few more questions if someone can help. 

 

 4. How can I tell if the gpu is being used by the OS and the open source drivers are loaded? After a lot of reading wrote down some commands like

lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display' which gave me:

Kernel driver in use amdgpu
Kernel modules       amdgpu

Does this mean that the opensource drivers are in use?

 

Also command dpkg -l amdgpu gave me:
dpkg-query: nopackages found matching amdgpu  (which is weird according to the above command)

 

In an article noticed that for the drivers to be installed you need to enable 32 bit architecture (Why is that? All drivers exist in 64 edition nowadays) and then install admgpu drivers and Vulcan also with opencl-icd with the following commands

 

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 
Install support for 32-bit games:

 

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu firmware-linux firmware-linux-nonfree libdrm-amdgpu1 
sudo apt install vulkan-tools vulkan-utils vulkan-validationlayers mesa-vulkan-drivers libvulkan1
sudo apt install mesa-opencl-icd

 

sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-dri:i386
Install support for Vulkan API (will be functional only if you have a Vulkan capable GPU):

 

sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386

 

Are all of the above really needed? Or do I need only the Vulkan part? Isnt Vulkan embedded in Kernel yet?

 

  I would like to apologise for the long post but I thing its better to keep all here than to spread my experience and questions in many seperate posts.

 

Thank you in advance!!

 

 

 

  

Edited March 30, 2020 by ieronymous

[Elienoier587]

Helped a lot. For this information I can customize it by myself.