Hello,

I am wondering if I can pass through a single port of my 4 port nic card on my poweredge r810 server to a windows vm? I watched spaceinvaders tutorial but it is confusing me because 2 ports are in 1 iommu group and 2 ports in another iommu group and they all have the same id. Here is a copy pasta from my device file: any ideas

 

IOMMU group 12:[14e4:1639] 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)

[14e4:1639] 01:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)

IOMMU group 13:[14e4:1639] 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)

[14e4:1639] 02:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)

Install the VFIO-PCI.CFG plugin or use 6.9.0-beta25 so you can bind just a sub-section of multiple devices with the same ID. That is obviously assuming the device is happy to be broken into smaller parts (figuratively).

 

In your particular case, I doubt you will be able to pass through just 1 port to the VM. If they come in pairs like that (and most importantly as individual functions within the same bus), they generally need to be passed through in pairs too.

 

Why do you want to do that though? Virtual NIC on a bridge works fine.

Thanks! I don't mind passing through the whole pair....I'm using one of my vm's as a vps for forex trading, which requires good ping times for placing trades etc. I was assuming that the hardware nic would be better than the virtio one in that case. Would it make any difference in my case as to which one I use?

1 hour ago, cryptothedog said:

Thanks! I don't mind passing through the whole pair....I'm using one of my vm's as a vps for forex trading, which requires good ping times for placing trades etc. I was assuming that the hardware nic would be better than the virtio one in that case. Would it make any difference in my case as to which one I use?

You have to test to see if if latency is high enough that it matters bridge vs passed-through NIC. From my experience, it's high enough that the diff doesn't quite matter but of course YMMV.

 

Won't matter which one you use.