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MatthiasSchmidt
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

PCI Passthrough of µPD720201 USB 3.0 Controller w/ ESXi 5.0u2

Hello!

I'm trying to "passthrough" a USB 3.0 Host Conroller PCIe Card with the NEC/Renesas µPD720201 4-Port Chip to a Windows Server 2003 guest with ESXi 5.0 update 2:

- The USB controller card shows as "Unknown USB Device" in the ESXi Passthrough configuration, but it can be selected and activated for passthrough

- The card will be recogniced from Windows 2003 Guest and the driver, version 30230, can be successfully installed, but the device does not work - a yellow exclamation mark with an error similar to "the device could not be started (code 10)" is shown in the device manager.

- A fresh installed Windows XP SP3 guest for testing will show the same behavior as the Windows 2003 guest.

- The card works fine unter a native Windows 2003 on the same hardware (for testing purposes, I have the old Windows 2003 installation, prior to the ESXi migration, on a small partition).

I found some posts, that the older controller chip, the NEC µPD720200, will work fine with passthrough (as other USB 3.0 controllers also) - but I was unable to find anything about the newer ones, the µPD720201 or µPD720202.

I also tried to get this running with the (current) ESXi 5.1, but this also failed with another, an essential, problem: the ESXi 5.1 seems to ignore a configured passthrough USB controller - the device will be unlisted after reboot. I found many posts in this forum about this issue and a post about an answer from a VMware technical support person, that this will not be supported anymore with ESXi 5.1.

So, I reverted back to ESXi 5.0u2, where this should basically work, but not in my case.

-> Does anyone have passthrough experience with the newer NEC/Renesas USB 3.0 Controllers and how to get this working?

Thanks.

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5 Replies
MatthiasSchmidt
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hello!

The problem could be solved now:

After deactivating the "Message-Signaled Interrupts" of the "passthroughed" PCI card in the virtual machine, the USB 3.0 controller works now.

This can be done with adding the parameter 'pciPassthru<no>.msiEnabled = "FALSE" ' to the VM configuration.

Following technical note was helpful in this case: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_vmdirectpath_host.pdf.

Thanks.

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srwsol
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Thank you very much for the post!  I was having trouble with a Renesas USB 3 card in that it would work when I passed it through to a Windows 7 VM, but it wouldn't work when I passed it through to a WinXP VM.  When I set pcipassthru0.msiEnabled to False it worked just fine under WinXP.  I went and set it that way on the Windows 7 VM and it still worked there too.

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joopworst
Contributor
Contributor

I have a µPD720202 controller running with ESXi 5.5. The controller is passed through to a Win7 x64 VM.

The VM sees it as USB controller and I am able to install the driver. After installation though Windows still says there are no driver's installed for this device. I've tried the Message-Signaled Interrupts command but no luck.

Does someone's got passthrough experience with the µPD720202 controller or any idea how to get this device working?


Thanks.

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VKAdmin
Contributor
Contributor

Hallo in this forum,

i am newby on this community and want to know about using this controller on ESXi host. I plan to connect some USB3 HDDs to transfer the data direct from host to HDD. Have anyone experience with this art of tasks?

P.S.: Sorry for grammatik Smiley Happy

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Xantion
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I'm having trouble with using this USB3.0 controller for PCI passthrough as well.

Setup:

HP Proliant DL360 G7

ESXi 6.0U3 HPE Image

uPD720202 4-port USB PCIe card

Server 2012 R2 VM or Server 2016 VM (Tried both)

I can enable passthrough for the card just fine but in the VM the USB root hub won't start (Code 10 error)

I've already tried setting iovDisableIR to FALSE in ESXi and setting pciPassthru#.msiEnabled to FALSE in the VM. Doesn't help..

Any suggestions?

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