GPU for IOMMU without reset issue

luqasz · November 27, 2017, 6:46pm

Hi.

I have a:
ASUS f2a85-v pro mobo (supports IOMMU)
AMD A10 5800K CPU
Radeon R7 260X

I’ve installed debian 9 (stretch) and launched windows 10 as a virtual machine without problems. Once I turn off virtual machine, I get a freeze or kernel panic.

I’d like to know if there is any hardware combination that does not have freezing issues ?

Leaving all vms (with GPU passed) turned on is a no go for me. Electricity costs, windows needs to reboot from time to time to apply updates.

FurryJackman · November 28, 2017, 1:39am

Seems this is a common issue for select Radeon cards. You might need to go with a RX 570 or higher (Not Vega, that has a reset issue) if you want to stick with Radeon, or just go Nvidia and apply the KVM lying fix for Nvidia Code 43. When I tried with a GTX 1060, it did not have a reset bug.

julfika · November 29, 2017, 8:16pm

You could try this to reset the card

Linux Host, Windows Guest, GPU passthrough reinitialization fix Linux

I noticed in Wendell’s recent GPU pass-through live stream, that he mentioned that there isn’t a reliable solution for the AMD GPU reinitialization problem. He mentioned that once a Windows guest VM on linux is shut down, the AMD GPU will refuse to reinitialize, and that this requires a reboot of the Host machine to fix. In my personal experience, this actually seemed to be rather random. Sometimes the VM would be able to boot back up, sometimes not. I found that it was not actually the shut down of the VM, but if the host machine enters a sleep state, while the VM was shut down, after having run at least once. The root issue I suspect has less to do with how Linux is treating the GPU, but the behaviour of the Windows OS while it is a guest. Mainly the Windows guest OS is not sending a signal to the GPU to shut-down or start up while it is running in a VM. I assume this is because when on bare-metal, when a Windows OS shuts down, power is actually killed to the GPU from the motherboard/PSU but when in a guest VM, this does not happen, leaving the GPU in an initialized state. Then if/when the host machine enters a low power state, and power is significantly reduced to the GPU, it enters a non-responsive state after the host machine wakes up. Anyway, I found a fix/work-around. I’ve borrowed bits from around the web for this. I don’t write how-to’s often, so bare with me. (note, all these steps take place inside the Windows Guest OS) Step 1 We are going to need the Windows Device Console (DevCon) It is included bundled with the Windows Driver Kit, which you can download and install like a chump, but you don’t require all the added bloat. So, instead download and install Chocolatey, so you can install it from terminal like a bad-ass. Follow the instructions on the Chocolatey website to install. Once Chocolatey is installed open a Windows command prompt and run this command to install DevCon: choco install devcon.portable DevCon is rather straight fo…

luqasz · December 1, 2017, 5:15pm

Thx for this step by step tutorial. I will try this on my current setup. Have you shared this with others ? I wonder how is their experience with this.

julfika · December 2, 2017, 11:20am

No and it seems like most people in the thread sadly didn’t test it either.

FurryJackman · December 2, 2017, 2:40pm

I’ll test it with my Fresco Logic USB 3.0 controller which has a reset issue as soon as my new GPU comes in.

luqasz · February 4, 2018, 7:22pm

I can confirm that with NPT patch I have no pci reset issues.

FurryJackman · February 4, 2018, 9:00pm

The reset fix with devcon64 works with the Windows Fresco Logic drivers, but as soon as you install the official Fresco Logic drivers, devcon64 can’t control the device and you get the reset issue again.