I grabbed an Acer Bifrost A770 a week or two back, without having heard about this. I’m working on getting it running. I think if I can get the PCI device ID swapped, the Windows driver install in a VFIO Win11 VM will sort out the firmware for me. No luck yet.
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Well, I’ve gotten SR-IOV working on the A770 off and on, and hopefully Intel will upstream this sooner than later, but have had no luck modding an A770 into a F170. I think all it would take is a full dump of a 170, force-written to the A770, but all the available downloads are just GOP+OPROM stuff, never the base data with card ID and such. Will revisit this if I can get dumps from a real F170, or if Intel does something braindead like releasing SR-IOV only for Flex. Since they enabled SR-IOV for IGPs, I don’t think that’s likely.
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Thanks for the response, your insight is much appreciated
Maybe wendell is getting close to dropping the guide, I mean he just did the F170 video and mentioned it again.
There’s really not a lot to it, the out-of-tree SR-IOV driver enables SR-IOV on A770 with the lightest of prodding, it’s clearly meant to do so. Doesn’t seem like there are checks for device ID getting in the way or anything. I have trouble getting the out-of-tree driver to compile/load on more recent kernels, though, and Intel said they were working on merging to mainline ages ago, but seem to have gotten distracted with their new XE driver.
Maybe the “guide” or the Intel action Wendell is hoping to provoke is just getting the SR-IOV driver merged to mainline, which would make it available to everyone and their dog before long.
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Thank you for the hint with the out of tree driver. This seems to be no secret since it is stated in the official intel driver docs. Since I can’t post links you have to search for kernel driver types within the Intel dgpu docs.
Right now we have prove that Arc is capable of SR-IOV but there is still no guide or reproducible proof of the concept. I’m really interested in the topic since it would open a new world of low cost VDI options. A single system for under 1500 bucks (if you cheap out on some server features) with an Intel 14900K + Arc 770 + Arc A380 could be enough for ~10 Windows/Linux VDI clients!
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I never had it working that well. You can crash all the vdi clients with driver/client instability (which is maybe why windows enterprise versions are nice).
The A770, I think, will maybe possibly eventually work without the kind-of-not-fun chip clip crossflash, with the out of tree driver, almost certainly no more than 7 devices… but really 2 devices (8gb each) or possibly 4 devices (4gb each).
The SRIOV on the igpu of i.e. the minisforum MS-01… video soon… is just kinda fun, kinda limited, kinda fun. moar is better tho for sure.
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Were you able to get the Flex 170 firmware from e.g. Cisco and flash your Intel ARC A770 LE? Thanks
Oh no, i used ARC for a while in my Unraid server and it was awful, almost no AI capability, semi good gaming experience.
i wait for an proper sriov unlock an buy another one for that, all i want is an all House/device Emulation VM/Desktop. Now i use an RTX a4500 to sad i cant crossflash an RTXa5000vbios on that.
Oh, I am 100% made of ears. I understand not wanting to make this generally available and potentially trashing lots of consumer GPUs, but I am absolutely on board. I did plenty of clip and solder jobs back in the Fasttrak66/100/133 days, and fear no SMDs.
Edit: I’m also looking into an SPI flasher to get Coreboot onto a couple of MSI 690/790 boards, so my venture cost might be really low.
If anyone has a flash dump of a flex 170 i can try flashing, it, I already tried flashing the cisco bin file, it’s alot smaller than the full dump so i think that the update files maybe just delta or a portion of the full bios flash.
Are we close to a release of the driver with SR-IOV support ?
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You’re halfway there. There are three pieces, the OPROM data, OPROM config, and the main VGA/GOP firmware. The Flex 170 updater updates the O-config and VGA/GOP, but not the OPROM data. Even though we have files that should cover that part, the various flashers will refuse or fail to write, and because it’s multi-part, external flashers are tricky to use.
Depends on how you define “close”. It looks like Intel is planning to roll out SR-IOV for pretty much all capable devices in the Xe driver, but that’s also a ways off, probably some months to a year. Personally, I’m betting on Xe being ready/default right around the time Battlemage hits the market.
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i thought something special was supposed to happen with kernel 6.9 release for arc and sriov
A bunch of folks who were expecting i915 and SR-IOV in 6.8.0 said “6.9.0 or later” when it didn’t happen, but that wasn’t Intel, just speculation. The Intel commentary I’ve seen has been very sparse, and seems to indicate they’ve semi-dropped SR-IOV+i915, and they’re waiting for the Xe driver instead, since it was written with SR-IOV in mind from the start.
I’m just guessing based on the things that do get out, and I’d love to be wrong, but that’s what I’ve seen.
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I have tried the Xe driver in 6.9 on my laptop with it’s iGPU and had some instability but from what I’ve read a lot (if not all) of the issues i ran into with it look to be fixed in 6.10 which I’m thinking of testing soon. If I do I’ll test the SR-IOV on my laptop with it, and then finally get my test system up with the A770 to try hacking on things based on this thread and other stuff I’ve seen. 6.9 does seem to mostly work, but what i ran into was some graphical corruption and stability with my displays (5120x1440@120Hz + 2x 2560x1440@120Hz) over thunderbolt/DP, I watched the 6.10 patches and there were a number of updates that I think fix that.
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Unfortunately, the importers in my country have decided to do the exact opposite of what they should do, stop all imports of Arc (not a recent development, I just did not have time to log in since then), and raise process even higher for everything, making an A750-class GPU start at the equivalent of ~$500 (be it AMD or NVidia, which starts at even higher here nowadays).
I am currently helping a friend get parts for a PC for his son (part of a birthday present, the other part is me coaching said son in setting it up), and I recommended him to get an A770 off Amazon, as that was the only option with enough horsepower for simultaneous gaming/streaming (AMD’s encoders, while improving, are still not good enough) that was under $500, including shipping and taxes.
Unfortunately, the BiFrost we were eyeing is no longer available at sane prices, however Sparkle’s offerings are decently priced (unfortunately, the Titan is far too long for the case, so we went with the Roc (that is an area where the BiFrost shines).
I am only mentioning all this, is because if I will have the budget, I will probably get the Sparkle A770 Titan myself (my Antec P9 will contain it just fine), so I was wondering whether anyone has tested it with SR-IoV?
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I don’t have any experience with the Sparkle model myself, but if you’re using the Intel out-of-tree driver, or waiting for the Xe driver to get default-enabled, I don’t see anything about the Sparkle model that wouldn’t work. The SR-IOV driver should work with any old Arc GPU, and most of the recent iGPUs. It was only a possible A770 → Flex 170 hard mod that you’d want a 100% vanilla model for. Since nothing more has showed up on that mod, I think we’re all waiting for Xe-mainline-default or tinkering with the Intel out-of-tree driver now.
I wish I had access to a Flex 170 to dump. I have a CH341A and a couple of SOIC adapters, I bet I could have gotten the cross flash working. The big advantage of that route is not needing the card outputs anymore, and easier access to SR-IOV.
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So basically
We’re waiting for the new XE driver to be finished/pushed to mainline
And sriov currently works if you run the out of tree driver?