Passthrough VM freezes if using GPU

Operating Systems & Open Source Virtualization
1

Hey all,

Went to boot my VM today for some work stuff and it wasn’t booting. After putting in a vnc spice to see what was happening, I saw that it was indeed booting and working mostly as it should, just not displaying to the monitor I have plugged into the passthrough GPU. So I rebooted the VM, switched inputs on the monitor to the one going to my passthrough, and through the vnc saw it boot and hang. My CPU usage flatlined. I rebooted the VM with no monitor and everything goes fine. I can’t find anything online for this so I thought maybe some wizard here could help me.

journalctl -xe
lspci -nnk
qemu xml

vfio conf

options vfio-pci ids=10de:1b06,10de:10ef nointxmask disable_vga=1 disable_idle_d3=1

Thanks so much for any help you can give me!

2

I’m learning myself so I’m no wizard, but did you try using the BIOS firmware option instead of the OVMF UEFI? I was never able to get the OVMF UEFI to work right.

3

OVMF has worked for me for about a year, and I think BIOS is worse for passthrough VMs. Not entirely sure, but every tutorial i’ve seen (both here and on the archwiki) has said to use OVMF so there must be a good reason. If you have a working passthrough with BIOS firmware I see no reason to not give it a shot though!