Long time lurker, first time poster. I recently built a X399 TaiChi based system with the hope of running a PCI Pass Through Windows VM on it. I just got the board back from RMA and seem to have found the same problem. I wanted to post here and see if there is some way to recover it beyond yet another RMA since I have no idea what has caused it.
The system configuration is two sets of Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200 64G kits, a Threadripper 2950X processor, a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD in the M2_1 slot, a Crucial P1 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD in the M2_2 slot, MSI Armor RX 590 in PCEI1, XFX RX 570 in PCIE4, Inateck USB 3.0 Host Controller in PCIE5. Following directions on the Arch wiki I had setup a boot script to map the USB Controller, RX 570, and Crucial drives to the fvio_pci device for pass-through.
I’m running Arch Linux, synced last night to the latest packages. Running kernel 5.2.14.arch2-1 and was not having any issues. Tried to create a Windows VM using virt-manager and the operation failed with a BAR size error. I removed the GPU PCI devices from the image and tried again, and libvirt hung. I attempted to restart the libvirtd process, and that did not respond either, but everything else worked. I decided to reboot and verify there were no configuration issues in the BIOS (I had already enabled IOMMU, SR-IOV, set DRAM timing from the Rzyen Calculator, etc). The system shutdown normally but then did not POST after the kernel halted. The power button was also non-responsive. So I switched off the PSU.
At this point, this may sound like a Linux problem but what happens next is why I posted in the hardware thread.
Powering the system back on, the ASRock Gear lights up, but the DRAM LEDs do not and the system will not boot from the case or motherboard power button. I can load a BIOS image on to a USB drive and use the FlackBack option, which does work (the light on the board and on the FlashBack botton all blink, as does the access light on my USB drive) but the system will not POST. A similar thing happened with my system when I first assembled it, and I went through an RMA with ASRock and just got the new Motherboard yesterday. The telltale sign is that when power is applied to the system, the DRAM LEDs do not light up. Some digging through various forum threads before lead me to a firmware issue where the firmware sometimes gets “stuck”, but I don’t see any way to correct this problem. I do not know how I’m causing this fault, or if there is any way to fix it, but figured I would reach out for help here before trying to go down the RMA path again.
I’m mostly concerned that since I don’t know what’s causing the fault I don’t know what needs to be done to prevent it. Lots of posts here and elsewhere all show people running VMs on Linux without issue. Any pointers or suggestions would be appreciated!
-Carl