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?

[GBowman]

Wow, didnt realise there was such a vibrant thread on this subject as I have been playing with this for 6 months.  Might as well ad my findings.

I have 2 machines now,  I started with a Gigabyte Q57m board, MATX for an HTPC an I now have an HP DC7900 with a Q45 chipset that I picked up on ebay for cheap as its fully VT-d compliant for under £100 so good for testing.

With both boards I am able to get 1 video card working in 1 slot but stangley its the primary x16 slot on the Q57 and the secondary x4 slot on the Q45, I get the same random BSOD's if I use the other slot (on its own or with the other slot being used).  Its strange that its the different port on the different MB's as both have an ICH10 chipset.  The Graphics cards I have are an HD5450 and an HD5770 and as I say both work fine in either machine but only in 1 of the 2 slots.  Cant get DXVA to work on either but gaming works just fine.  All attempts to use Nvidia resulted in a code 10 error as with everyone else.

Now I have a problem as the HTPC has been in use for 6 months I finally fitted my BD drive and installed Any DVD to overcome the HDCP issues but PowerDVD freezes after an update.  Its probably the final nail in the coffin as its been hard to get this far but its a shame as bar this one issue its working so well.  Got the VPN and Trixbox all working on an ESXi HTPC.

[DMG210]

Hi all,

I can confirm you can successfully use an ASUS ATI Radeon HD 4350 in a PCI-E x8 slot.

Hardware Specs:
SuperMicro X8SIL-F
Xeon 3440
32gb ram
Dell Perc6i with 8 x 2tb Samsung F4's (raid 5) - pass-through to Windows Server 2008 R2 (need firmware 6.3.1-0003+)
Dell Perc6i with 4 x 120gb OCZ Agility SSD (raid 0) for VMFS

ASUS ATI Radeon HD 4350 - pass-though to XBMC for HDMI out with Audio (haven't confirmed yet)

I plan on using HDMI over ethernet + USB over ethernet for remote control to connect to my TV in the lounge.

I have successfully passed through the Radeon HD 4350 to a Windows 7 VM under ESXi 5. I have only assigned 2GB RAM currently so I'm too sure if there is a limitation here or not.

The drivers installed without a hitch and I'm able to play 1080p video via Remote Desktop / RemoteFX.

EDIT: hardware acceleration doesn't work (receive a green screen from HD MKV's. I've tried various codecs, DXVA / FDDSHOW etc.

Strange thing is when playing 1080p video / Youtube HD via remote desktop/RemoteFX I have under 1% CPU utilisation...

The Radeon HD 4350 works flawlessly under Windows 7 x64 with the 11.12 Display Driver Package. HDMI audio working too!

No HDCP currently, also no DXVA via HDMI which is odd as it works fine via RDP/RemoteFX.

This maybe because the VMware adapter is still present, sorry I didn't have much time last night but hopefully I'll be able to get it working soon. I'm also going to try Linux/XBMC and Mac when I have some time.

Has anyone tried passing through a TV tuner like the BlackGold BGT3600 DVB-T2 / DVB-S2?

Next thing to try will be XBMC + yaVDR (PVR) if the card supports it...

Has anyone had success with DXVA or HDCP via VMDirectPath?

joiegils, are you running the XBMC from the live CD? or are you running it on Windows? Also I guess you are able to get DXVA working correctly?

[joiegils]

i´m running xbmc from windows and dxva works.

i was just finishing to put the other windows machine up and i run it with hdmi over cat5 i keep my server in my garage and i put the remote over usb cable

the hdmi is 1080i

when all my 5 machines are up and running 2 with windows and xmbc and playing from the server the load on the vmware is just over 20% i love this setup.

now the only thing i need is more memorey to put more machines in it.

[joiegils]

i passthroug a tv card it is only dvb-t card but it works. it is ubuntu with vdr on it and i stream my tv to the xmbc and everything works great

[DMG210]

Great! That's what I'm trying to achieve with the HDMI over ethernet as well

Do you know if HDCP works?

This tool is quite neat: http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/bd-support/diagnosis.do

Looks like I'll be purchasing the Radeon 5450. Its a shame no ones had success with the Radeon 6450

When you say stream tv to the xbmc, do you mean live tv? or just recorded tv?

[joiegils]

i´m not planing on using bluray but i ran the tool and it says no on hdcp but it strange because when i was setting it up the somewhere i saw hdcp yes in display or somewhere there because i had problem with my old tv and my yamaha sound because that tv had no hdmi in on it just dvi but on this tv i have hdmi and now  i can use the hdmi over cat5. i got 2 cat5 not shilded and it is about 20m and 1080i

i can stream the tv from the tv card that is in the machine both live and records

[derickso]

I wonder if there is anything in the virtual bios when the VM boots that would allow you to select which video card is primary, the built-in or the pass-thru?  Or whether there is some registry or other trick you could use to get VMware's adapter to not be selected.

I am more troubled that DXVA doesn't work, does that mean if you watch say a 1080P WMC recorded video that it is choppy or jerky (or audio pops) when hooked up to a TV?

Also is anyone able to pass through keyboard/mouse/IR blaster from the USB onboard ports or did you need to pass through a full USB card to windows to use them?

[GBowman]

I looked at all the obvious stuff to remove the VM VGA from the bios and from the macine configuration file but no luck.  If you disable it in Windows it kills the other VGA adapter aswell.

To get your USB's through you have to pass thru the whole adaptor.  On my Q57m this shows as 2 USB2 addaptors, one has all the on board ports on it and the other has all the header ports.  On my Q45 this shows as a pair of USB2 hubs and then 6 usb1.1 devices.  You have to pass thru the USB2 hub and 3 of the USB1.1 ports to the same machine to get it to work but its the same as before, one USB2 controller has all the mother board porst and the other has all the header ports.

Also I have heard many times there is a limit of 4 pass thru devices per VM but I have now had 6 (pciPassThru0 - pciPassThru5) as the usb ports take up 4 by themselfs.

Still cant get DXVA to work on either of the hd5450 or 5770 so CPU use is high when playing MKV's.  I dont think there is any reason a 6450 wont work its just not going to be any better than any other HD card, I think the limitation is the motherboard bios myself not the cards.

[aaronvm]

Thanks for the info jhonny.

Unfortunately the onboard Realtek ALC888 audio doesn't function correctly in either Win7 64-bit or Ubuntu 11.10 w/ ESXi 5 using passthrough on the Shuttle.  The drivers install fine, the card is detected fine, but the sound is almost completely distorted.  It stutters badly (unusable).  Sometimes you can make out some of the proper sounds, but it's just overlayed with this noisy stutter.

I know the hardware is good, because if I boot from the Ubuntu LiveCD, the sound works fine when not running under a VM.

Anyone else experience something similar, or know the technical reason for the stutter?  The fact that it works in XenServer suggests it is a software limitation of ESXi only.

I thought about picking up a USB sound card, but there is a knowledgebase article that explicitly states these are unsupported due to their use of isochronous transfers.

[joiegils]

i have 2 usb controllers on my board and i pass them to the windows machines that have xbmc on them and then i put usb hub to the usb controller on both machine and everything goes in the hub then i can use every usb device i want to i have on one of my windows machine a usb sound card because i just use stereo speaker in my kithcen where this machine is and that works fine and i also have remote in the kitchen and everything works.

on the other machine i have also working usb remote the hub is in my garage and i run the usb over cat5 i just solderit the plug to the cat5 and plug it in the hub on the other hand.

the only problem i see is i want to put another machine in my bedroom but do not have any more usb to control that machine so i´m planning on trying to buy a usb controller and try to passthroug that to the 3rd machine and see if that works.

[GBowman]

I have the Audio passed though on the Q57m which is a Realtek ALC888B and this works perfectly but only after giving the machine some reserved CPU time, however the audio on the HP DC7900 would not work, it was choppy and corrupted.  I have a Logitech USB sound working just fine, also a Toshiba Dynadock with video and sound over USB works just fine.

I have tried a USB PCI card and it worked just fine for pass through.

[eddie4]

I have been trying for days to get my setup to work. I even specifcaly bought the hardware to get this to work. But I might have made a big mistake.

I got the fallowing hardware:

Intel DQ57TM

Intel Core I5-650

16GB of mem

After trying many many graphic cards I kept getting the well know BSOD atikmpag.sys. I started to lookinto the hardware I bought. Thinking that the problem might be whit the CPU I have found the fallowing topic on the intel site.

http://communities.intel.com/message/129595

It seems that the core I5 doesn't support certain features of VT-d:

The following features are not supported by the processor with Intel VT-d:

• No support for PCISIG endpoint caching (ATS)

• No support for interrupt remapping

• No support for advance fault reporting

• No support for super pages

• No support for 1 or 2 level page walks for isoch remap engine and 1, 2, or 3 level walks for non-isoch remap engine

• No support for Intel VT-d translation bypass address range (such usage models need to be resolved with VMM help in setting up the page tables correctly)

I am however not sure if this is the source of my troubles. The support for interrupt remapping seems like something that would be critical. But is this the source of my problems?

[derickso]

I would suggest you try that setup in XenServer 6, it seems to have much better luck with pass thru video cards, and if it works there at least you know it isn't a hardware issue.

[aaronvm]

This is not the problem.  I have a second generation i5 (i5-2500).  The datasheet says that interrupt remapping is supported.  Yet I get the same BSOD.

Thanks for your post though, I did not realize VT-d had so many subfeatures that may or may not be supported by a specific processor claiming to have VT-d support.

[eddie4]

I have attempted xenserver from citrix. I assumed everyone is talking about xenserver from citrix and not the opensource xen. But I ran into the same brick wall: BSOD atikmpag.sys. Granted I didn't spent a whole lot of time trying to get it to work because there wasn't much literture about the subject.

I checked most setup's on the forum and I haven't found one that worked and didn't have interrupt remapping.

Intel I7-950 (works has remapping)

Intel I7-960 (works has remapping)

Intel I7-2600 (works has remapping)

Intel Xeon 3440 (works has remapping)

Intel Xeon L5520 (works has remapping)

AMD Opteron 4180

Didn't work (Note this doesn't mean anything there could be other reasons):

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400(BSOD ati2dvag.sys 0x000000ea)
Intel i5 2500T (BSOD ati2dvag.sys 0x000000ea)
Intel i7 2600

@aaronvm

There might be other reasons why your setup isn't working. Am not calling this myth busted until I see a working setup without interrupt remapping.

[GBowman]

My E8400 on the Q45 (HP7900DC) gets the BSOD with grahpics cards in the primary x16 PCIe slot but works perfectly with the cards in the chipset x4 slot.

My Q57m with an I7,870 works with the graphics cards in the primary x16 slot but gets the BSOD's with the cards in the secondary chipset x4 slot.

I think it has more to do with the  motherboard Bios myself although there are many more archetectral differences between a C2D chip and an I7, both are running the ICH10 southbridge I beleive so you would think the x4 slot would work the same on both, as it doesnt I would suspect the BIOS differences.

[BLANGAS]

Hi Rick,

Can you direct me or what you think good documentations on VMDIRECT PATH.

Bill

[GBowman]

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_vmdirectpath_host.pdf

I found this very usefull.

[jhonnypolak]

Since there's been a new update to ESXi and Shuttle i thought I'd give this another shot.

New build version is : 5.0.0 (build: 515841)

New Shuttle firmware is: SH67H000.115

I've also tried Windows 7 Enterprise 32bit, no luck

still BSOD atikmpag.sys

[wowoteur]

Hello,

I try but i didn't success...

I have :

DQ67OW

I5-2500

16go DDR3

HD 5450 ATI pcie 16x

And ESXi 5.0

I try with many tips but nothing start.

I always have BSOD or I can not activate my video card.

I try with windows 7 or XBMC.

Do you have a solution?

Thanks.

Sorry for my english... i am French.