Difficulty Passing Through USB PCI-e Card

[sinaghaffari]

Hi everyone,

I've been trying to set up a Windows 10 VM on my unraid system. I've managed to successfully pass through my GPU, and managed to successfully boot off of an NVMe drive. The last remaining step was to pass through a dedicated PCI-e USB card because I couldn't pass through any of my motherboard's onboard USB controllers.

I purchased two different cards (unknowingly both with the same USB chips):
- Startech PEXUS313AC2V
- Sonnet Allegro Pro USB3-PRO-4P10-E

Both of these cards feature two of the ASM1142 controllers.

When I pass them in, they show up in the guest Windows machine, but don't recognize when any devices are plugged in. I can even install the OEM drivers for them, but they still wont work.

What I've tried:
1) ACS Override On/Off
2) vfio-pci.ids/pci-stub.ids
3) i440fx/Q35

  - Using Q35, I even replicated the upstream/downstream PCI bridges to accurately simulate the way the cards show up in a native windows install.
4) Passing in just one of the controllers, the other, or both.
5) Two different cards with the same controllers but *slightly* different PCI bridges
6) Different PCIe slots
... And likely other things that I forget, I'll keep this list up to date.

In most of those cases the result is the same, the controllers show up in the guest OS, but will not recognize any plugged in devices. In some cases, the guest OS will crash when there is a change in the USB devices that were plugged in, though I haven't narrowed out when exactly that happens.

 

All the output I can think of:

PC Specs:
- CPU: Threadripper 3990x

- Motherboard: Gigabyte TRX40 DESIGNARE (rev. 1.0)

- RAM: 64 GB

- GPU1: GTX 980ti
- GPU2: GT 710

VM XML:
- i440fx: https://pastebin.com/wGUVWSew

- Q35: https://pastebin.com/XRJiG8Wc

System Devices:
- ACS Override On: https://pastebin.com/LbsewFau
- ACS Override Off: https://pastebin.com/QdfG0pKA

Relevant dmesg:

- `dmesg | grep '4c\|4d'` https://pastebin.com/SrNSbQAK

 

Output of lspci:
- `lspci -t` https://pastebin.com/4QGgDwaq
- `lspci -vv | grep -A 54 '4c:00.0|4d:00.0'` https://pastebin.com/c89paFde

Please let me know if there is any other info that I can provide.

At this point, I'm equally okay with the prospect of getting one of these USB cards to pass through, or just buying a (fast) USB card that I know will work.

Edited May 1, 2020 by sinaghaffari
Added VM XLM

[sinaghaffari]

Bump on this! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated :)