Code 43 with GPU pass-through in KVM

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

Hello there,
I just recently moved my main system from Win10 to Ubuntu 18.04 and so far I love it. I found good replacements and workarounds for most software, but I just can’t live without the Adobe package, so I am using a KVM VM with Win10. As many Adobe programs love to have at least some dedicated GPU I followed this guide (with some other random resources):


And I successfully have my Geforce 210 showing up in Device Manager, but still have the Code 43 error.
I did follow these steps to fool the Nvidia drivers:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#.22Error_43:_Driver_failed_to_load.22_on_Nvidia_GPUs_passed_to_Windows_VMs
I wasn’t however able to quite follow the section ““BAR 3: cannot reserve [mem]” error in dmesg after starting VM” as my Linux knowledge is still quite rudimentary and the PCI-E hierarchy just looked like gibberish to me.
The only other thing was that there was no kvm section yet in the configuration, so I just created one, I don’t think that is and issue though.

I am also having some issues in Premiere Pro where it stutters, first I though it was audio bound, so I changed the Sound device to ac97, but no change. Audio outside of Premiere works fine, so it might be a performance thing. I am passing through 8 cores and 16gb ram though, so that shouldn’t be it. Maybe a real GPU will fix it. The only thing I noticed is that drive performance is slow (around 20MB/s transfers) although I have the VM on an SSD, any ideas on how to improve that?

2

Looks like this resolved Code 43 for this fellow.

3

I am downloading some games to test if the passthrough is reacting correctly and I’ll comment the results

4

I looked through the thread and it seems like I did mostly the same. I installed windows first however and am now trying to add GPU pass-through later.

@FurryJackman mentioned something about needing older Nvidia drivers, I just installed the drivers in device manager with the automated tool from Windows, should I manually install older drivers?

5

Device Manager will pull the latest WDDM certified driver, which could be new enough to cause this issue. Yes, you should manually install an older driver. 378.78 is available on Guru3D.

6

That driver doesn’t actually support the GPU I’m using (Geforce 210). Is there any other driver that I should try?
I am planing on upgrading my main GPU (currently a gtx 970) but I want to wait for the 1100 series. At that point the 970 will become the pass-through card and I can use that driver. Would be great though to have something for the mean time.

7

GT 710 GDDR5 should support that driver. The 210 is ancient by today’s standards. Desktop Compositors will give a very hard time on that GPU. I do NOT recommend the GT 1030 due to the whole DDR4 vs GDDR5 debacle. Plus it’s double the price of a 710 GDDR5.

8

I guess you’re right, I didn’t realize quite how old the 210 really is. I probably wouldn’t gain much with it anyways then.
I just bought it a couple years back when I needed a basic display adapter and it was the cheapest option.

So I will wait with pass-through until I get a new GPU to make my 970 available.

9

So here I am again. I now got a cheap used 1070ti which I am trying to pass through instead.

But yet again I got stuck, this time at a different spot. I have made all the additions to the various files as outlined in this guide: https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/
When I run “dmesg | grep pci-stub”, there is no output whatsoever. I am guessing that this means that the GPU isn’t properly caught by pci-stub. When I try to pass through the GPU anyways in KVM, the VM doesn’t start and the system locks up.

Here is the output for lspci | grep VGA:

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 (rev a1)
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM204 [GeForce GTX 970] (rev a1)

And for the 1070ti specifically:

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [10de:1b82] (rev a1)
03:00.1 Audio device [0403]: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 High Definition Audio Controller [10de:10f0] (rev a1)

And this is what I changed in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“modprobe.blacklist=nouveau quiet splash intel_iommu=on pci-stub.ids=10de:1b82,10de:10f0”

Is there anything standing out to any of you that I did wrong?

10

Are you running dmesg as root? Try adding sudo before it.

11

I wasn’t, as the guide didn’t, but there is no difference if I do. “sudo dmesg | grep pci-stub” still doesn’t return anything.

12

It’s possible it’s not loaded in your kernel. Fedora bundles pci-stub with it’s kernels, but other distros may not bundle pci-stub and you may have to load it manually somehow.

13

Do you, or anyone else have any Idea on how I might do that?

14

So I managed to overcome this issue, the problem was that the nvidia driver would grab the card, before the vfio-pci drivers had a chance. The solution was to change this line in grub to specifically set the vfio-pci drivers for the iommu group of the wanted GPU:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=“iommu=14 intel_iommu=on rd.driver.pre=vfio-pci”

Now my problem is that somehow I managed to pick the only 10 Series Nvidia card that isn’t supported by the 378.78 driver, so I am once again battling the Code 43 error.

@FurryJackman Do you know of another driver that will work in Windows, that also supports the 1070ti?

15

Well, it seems that the newest compatible driver I could find is 388.13, which still gave me the error. Unless anyone has any other idea, I guess pass through with the 1070ti isn’t possible.

So I will have to settle to passing through the 970 and using the 1070ti for Linux.

16

You would want to manually extract the “installer only” for the first driver that came out for the 1070 Ti, 388.13 (or the one immediately after that, 388.31)

Don’t just immediately go and run the EXE!

Use 7zip to extract only these folders and files out of that driver package EXE:

/Display.Driver
/NVI2
EULA.txt
ListDevices.txt
setup.cfg
setup.exe

Put them all in the same destination folder and install the driver. That removes all the Nvidia bloatware starting from the 38x.xx drivers onwards.

17

Darn. Have you tried turning off the “hypervisor?”

it should look like this in the <cpu> section:

<cpu>
...
    <feature policy='disable' name='hypervisor'/>
...
</cpu>
1 Like
18

Thank you for not giving up on this, these are some good tips. I never knew how much junk there is in the nvidia drivers.
Sadly though both tips didn’t do anything about the error43. I even tried it again on a clean install to make sure it didn’t have anything left somewhere, but no luck.

19

You should try and look up if anyone has had success with the 1070 Ti.

At worst, you can try this from the Passthrough Post. (my mortal enemy now)

Edit: Not many success stories with the 1070 Ti. Looks like because this is the newest Nvidia card that they may have actually cracked down on Virtualization.