VMDirectPath and ATI Radeon

[taylorjonl]

I am using VMware ESXi and I am trying to setup a guest that is Windows 7 that will have an ATI Radeon video card passed through to it.  I actually had this working on a previous system but I had to reinstall.  Now when I do this the guest fails to start and I get the following:

Error message from localhost.XXXXXXXXXXX:
PCIPassthru 004:00.0: Guest tried to (null)map
32 device pages (with base address of 0xb5d20)
to a range occupied by main memory. This is
outside of the PCI Hole. Add pciHole.start =
"2909" to the configuration file and then power
on the VM.
error
12/23/2010 1:04:36 PM
media
User

When I do as it asks, the guest now starts but gets an immediate BSOD concerning memory management.  Any ideas on why this is occuring and why it worked at one point but now it fails?

[derickso]

Step 1, buy a recent Amd Radeon...

[derickso]

Hi Matt

If you have been able to get Nvidia cards working do you mind updating the Google doc with specifics about these systems, and anything special you needed to do to get them to work?

[MattGagliardi]

I did in fact update the spreadsheet this morning. I'm sorry but I don't have time at the moment to pull BIOS revisions, etc. Suffice to say that with modern hardware and recent BIOS revisions I've not had any problems getting it to work.

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.

[derickso]

Thanks Matt! Have you had any experience with the consumer grade cards? It looks like the ones you used are the high end professional ones.

[MattGagliardi]

I've not experimented with the home-grade cards as this has all been business-focused for me and I've got access to the high-end stuff.  One of these days when I dig myself out of current projects perhaps I'll have time to give that a shot.

[rbblue234]

i just tried an asrock extreme 4 (z77) with an ATI 6950 and ati 6450.  I was not able to get the video card passed through and used.

[rbblue234]

odd thing...

I get the same blue screen within windows 7 on my asrock extreme 4 mobo reguardless if im running vmware 5.1 or 5.0.1.   In 5.0.1, I'm able to passthrough my ceton card without issues. In 5.1, The host crashes when trying ot passtrhough a ceton card.

[derickso]

5.1 broke a lot of aspects of pass through, stick with 5.0.x for now.

[rbblue234]

i have a asrock sabertooth x58 mobo that i was able to passthrogh an ati card without issue (even game on it).  It's my understanding that motherboard did not support vt-d, but vt-x.   Any idea why im able to passthrough on an older MoBo and not a new-ish one?  The asrock extreme 4 support vt-x and vt-d.

Using the asrock extreme 4, I'm able to passthrough the ceton card, but but the ati card.   When i used the asuse sabertooth x58...  i was able to passthrough the ati card, but not ceton without host crash.

[derickso]

I would suspect many of these problems are from poorly written BIOS

code, these are enterprise features rarely used (or apparently tested)

on low-level consumer motherboards. Pick up a server class motherboard,

these work in the majority of cases.

[kthree]

Please refer to my post a few pages back. I have a ASRock Z77 Extreme4-M working with no problems, you just need to tweak a few bios settings.

[admin]

Hi,

I just got it working with CentOS 6.3 on a ASUS Z77 Sabertooth Mobo, ASUS HD6450 graphics card on ESX 5.0.1. The key to getting it to work was to turn of KMS (kernel mode setting) by booting with the option fglrx.modeset=0. Before that the X server would hang, sucking up 100% CPU. For those of you who were getting that message about missing BIOS, I suggest this fix.

Good luck.

[rbblue234]

Perfect!   Just watched a new episode of star wars, the clone wars on my new virtual HTPC.  

Thanks all!

Confirmed working.

asrock extreme 4

ati HD 6450 over HDMI.

[MarBen]

Unfortunately, my Shuttle SZ77 has no BIOS setting in order to disable onboard graphics (and no jumper on the board, either). I can just toggle between onboard graphics and PCI-E for the primary boot device. Just disabling onboard HD audio results in a BSOD during installation of ATI display driver ...

I use the inofficial Shuttle BIOS that has been posted in this forum about three months ago. The latest official version has been published back in July; maybe I'll try to contact them directly and ask for another "inofficial" BIOS ...

Cheers

[rmathis1984]

Working Setup!

ASRock H77 Pro4-M - BIOS 1.60 shipped version is 1.3 which has minor problems.

Intel i7 3770

32GB Ram

HIS 7750 - Leave the DVI adapter on and you shouldnt have the wired issues some have reported with display changing resolution.

ESXi 5.1 works but no USB as everyone else has noticed. Confirmed for me..

Rolling back to ESXi 5.0 in a few for full use.

Windows 7 x64 bit 2GB Ram and x2 CPU. This is without the pinHole trick. EDIT - Now 6GB and x3 CPU's with pinHole.

Tips on this board...

Set the video to PCIe. Set the shared memory to AUTO "Disable IGPU" and disable the onboard audio. And Enable VT-d "Off by default and firmware updates" Leave the catalyst control center out of the install it seems to help for some odd reason.

Tested DVI so far and its flawless.

EDIT - HDMI tested audio passed thru with no problems at all. No noticeable lag playing media files as of yet.

[derickso]

Has anyone tried watching Netflix using the Media Center UI app?  I've been having random crashes using the Cat 12.6 drivers, but it would only crash the VM.  Today I tried upgrading to 12.10, and when it crashed while watching Netflix it crashed the entire server ^.^

[KRA77]

Update on my situation(page 21 and 22):

As notet earlier:

Linux works fine with passthrough.

WHS2011 install drivers fine, but no way to get output on TV, catalyst will not start.

W8 Consumer Preview, drivers install fine, output on TV, catalyst will not start.

I now  tested W7 32bit, it installed drivers fine and everything works perfect, catalyst etc.

So since I was running low on diskspace to host VMs I tried to install W7 as a dualboot on the WHS2011 system (it has a 2 TB RDM harddisk), but now I experience the same issue on W7 as I did on WHS2011, everything installs fine and and reports as fine, but no output to TV and catalyst refuse to start. I compared the working W7 VM to the none working WHS2011 (with W7 dualboot) and they are exactly the same, except for it beeing installed on a RDM harddisk rather than virual disk.

I actually replaced the virtual disk in my working W7 VM with the RDM disk and boot up W7 from it, and it still did not work.

It's really frustrating that install media can block if it's working or not.

[rmathis1984]

On the Win7 on RDM mapping one. What steps did you take to from start to finish on setting up the VM?

I have a Win7x32 on a RDM on a HP DL360 G6 and it works prefect with a FirePro 3k series "POS Card". The box at home is the last one I posted where I ran into problems with ATI 4xxx cards so got a 7750 for $100 and called it good.

I did notice one thing that kept catching me up. When you do the driver install leave the Cat out of it at first! It seems to work quite well. I've been getting very lucky with starting with a Win7 box with 2CPU's and 2GB ram then doing all the config first. That's without the pci.Hole trick that seems to cause more problems when doing the install. After the driver is installed shutdown and add the value and kick the RAM up to what you need. I've done that general process about 15 times so far and it's been flawless each time.

If the machine starts with extra RAM fell free to install the Cat and it should be fine after. Snap shot first...

For WHS I've personaly never used it but I would assume it's the same as the Win7 box when it comes to the inital config. Also how are you trying to do the output DVI/HDMI?

[KRA77]

Actually, on the working Win7 VM, I installed the VM first and later added the passthrough device, then I did install drivers only, and when it was working I installed Catalyst. (need catalyst to remove stupid overscan compensation).

Problem on both WHS and Win7 that is not working is that catalyst refuse to start. In display manager only the vmware display is listed. However in device manager ATi card is listed as installed and working.

On Win7 / WHS dualboot on RDM, I did full driver and catalyst install. This VM I first installed WHS, but it was not working, later I installed W7 as dualboot (without passthrough enable) then I enable passthrough and do full install, and experience same in W7 as in WHS.

I'm not using pci.Hole trick, I only have 2GB on my VMs

[derickso]

Make sure you have a display connected to the card, I get Catalyst errors on startup if a display isn't connected to the card.