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kintaroju
Contributor
Contributor

PSOD when using USB passthrough

Hi,

I've been having issues with USB passthrough on my ESXi 7.0b setup. The USB devices I have connected to the USB controller are the following 3 devices:

USB 3.0 Hub

USB 56k conexant modem (CX93010 ACF)

Corsair Commander Pro (I use this to control the fans and get temperature reading of the system)

My hardware setup is consumer grade hardware (I know this is not a typical ESXi setup)

Core i5-8600

32GB RAM

Gigabyte Z370N Wifi (ITX Motherboard)

WD SN720 1TB NVMe Drive

Samsung 1TB SATA SSD

Seagate 240GB SATA SSD

Intel i350-T4 NIC

The one thing this setup cannot do is pci passthrough for the ONLY usb controller on the motherboard, so my only option is to use USB device passthrough which ESXi handles.

The system will PSOD when I try to check on the temperatures on the VM that is hosting all the USB devices from the above. The frequency of the PSOD is infrequent as I can't get it to PSOD on demand. Below is the screen shot from the PSOD which leads me to believe it's one of the USB devices since I had the server run solidly for a month when the USB devices aren't being passthrough'ed.

20200727_085847.jpg

The one thing I am trying to do at the moment is turn off all power management on USB devices and see if that will help.

If anyone can confirm or help me decrypt the PSOD to help me narrow down why I am getting a PSOD that would be appreciated!

5 Replies
DominikWeglarz
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Seems you have unsupported hardware.

Anyway - you can try to use legacy USB drivers - maybe it will help.

You can disable the vmkusb driver by running

esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=FALSE

Legacy USB drivers will be loaded at the next reboot.

To re-enable the vmkusb driver, run

esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=TRUE

and reboot the host.

If the host will not boot completely to use the solution, please follow the below steps:

Reboot the ESXi host.

During the pre-boot splash screen, press SHIFT-O to modify the boot options.

In the resulting screen, add the following to the end of the boot line:

jumpstart.disable=vmkusb

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DominikWeglarz
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

And if you want to investigate PSOD you can start here :

VMware Knowledge Base

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DominikWeglarz
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

And you should read also this :

VMware Knowledge Base

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kintaroju
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Dominik,

I'll try the legacy driver in a bit and see if that increases the stability after seeing if the power management setting changes help or not. (trying to avoid switching to legacy drivers, as I am afraid it could be down the roadmap for them to axe, just like how they axed vmklinux drivers in 7.0)

As for you other articles about articles about PSOD errors, it pointed towards hardware issues potentially, which confirms that it's related to the USB devices causing the PSOD:

VMware Knowledge Base

I know the devices I have aren't "certified" and are basically fringe devices that might or might not work. The hardware for my setup is for my own ESXi homelab.

Appreciate your thoughts into the issue!

Cheers,

Jon

kintaroju
Contributor
Contributor

Have been running all the USB devices without any issues, by just adjusting the Windows power management settings on the USB devices. So far no PSOD and have been running solidly for 14 days.

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