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?

[janshien1]

Does your 7790 work with DXVA?  I have the 5540 and when I check the box for hardware acceleration I get a green screen in Flash and VLC.  I was wondering if upgrading to the 7750 would work as they are on sale.

Thanks

Joe

[dd3]

@janshien1

Sorry for late reply. I tried a HD h264 video sample in VLC and MPC and it plays fine. In MPC active decoder is dxva2n.

[larrebarre]

i just bought a server with amd motherboard and processor.

I've been using a 6950, and i can report that i'm at this second is writing through my virtual machine with DXVA support. I've been playing Battlefield 3 through it aswell!

What i have problems with is the sound. it looks like it gets hiccups now and then. I suppose it's driver related. aswell as i got some weird problems when upgrading HW to 10. what i'm using is a HW8 virtual machine and that works fine.

I'll explain more what happend with my HW10 machine. I installed everything as it was suppsoed to be on a HW8, then upgraded to HW10, and everything worked fine, until one reboot then my audio device reported "cannot start". For some weird reason.

I then created a new HW8 machine and moved my virtual harddrive to that machine, and i started up the machine and the sound worked again.

I think that all this is driverrelated.

Anyone got some explaination more than it might be driver related?

[kingsteve82]

I have a build where we are using a Firepro S7000 and I had been trying to get it working in passthrough. Under 4.1, had BSOD after going over 2GB RAM in the VM. Upgraded to ESXi 5.1, same thing. Tried pciHole.start fix under both versions with no positive impact. Upgraded again to 5.5 and now have passthrough working with 8GB RAM to a Citrix VM for publishing HW accelerated graphics apps. Performance is good so far, but I did have a problem like the poster above where the HDMI PCI device on the board would not pass through. Doesn't affect my build so we are just leaving it out.

Would like to be able to run VSGA with an AMD card in the near future. Is a VIB driver expected to be released, similar to the NVIDIA cards?

[wenlez]

If I plan to use 8GB of RAM and a ATI Radeon 7850 2GB , do i still set the pciHole.start=1200 and pciHold.end=2200 ?

[wenlez]

Any one has issue with the Video output not being full screen / doesn't reach edge to edge?

I have ESXi 5.1 installed, passthrough AMD HD7850. Video output to the screen, via HDMI, 1080p, but the video is shrinked to the center, doens't reach to side and top/bottom edges.

[KRA77]

Adjust/Turn off overscan in catalyst control center

[jojo012]

I am using ESXI 5.5 . I have 2 HD 7950. I use one 7950 in passthrough mode without any problem. but when i try to passthrough 2 of them in same ESXI host, it doesn't boot. if i use 2 HD7950 in two different host, they do boot up fine but only one gpu works.

does anybody passthrough 2 or multi gpu in same host?

[crankshaft]

Hi;

I realize that the thread topic is ATI Radeon, however I don't have an ATI card and are trying to use what I have, which is a NVIDIA GT630.

I have successfully configured it as a pass-through, and assigned the PCI Device to a Win 7 virtual M/C, win 7 recognizes the adapted, it shows in the devices, with an exclamation mark and under the device's general tab the message is "The Device Cannot Start (code 10).

Does the fact that ESXI (5,1) and the VM have recognized the card mean that it should work, and if so any suggestions on how I can troubleshoot or get it working without having to buy a new AMD card ?

Many Thanks

[KiwiDave]

In short, getting Nvidia to work is a no-go (unless certain things have changed).

You may be able to get it working with Xen, but ESXi will be a struggle at best and failure as the norm.

[crankshaft]

Thanks, yes I had researched this for the last 2 days before I asked the question, but I did not find any posts who said that they succeeded in getting it recognized, configured and added to a VM and also recognized by the VM, and I was therefore hopeful that things had changed (in 5.1 - update 1) and that the previous attempts were not able to get this far.

If I was to buy one of the AMD cards that others have said works, and follow the steps that I have taken, should it be recognized and work immediately, or are their other steps which need to be taken as well ??

Thanks again.

[KRA77]

Crankshaft, make sure you have installed vmware tools

[crankshaft]

@KRA77 - Thanks for the suggestion, yes vmware tools is installed, I also did a re-installation just to be sure, unfortunately nothing changed

[crankshaft]

I bit the bullet and went out and bought a 7750, initially had the same problem, then I uninstalled the device and re-detected it and installed the drivers, and windows still refused to start it saying something about unsigned drivers.

So I un-installed and re-installed again, and windows now detects both displays, however whenever I try to switch to the passthrough 7750, I ge the BSOD.

I have tried both options to use the new device as the display and "Extend These Displays" - both result in the BSOD.

I don't seem to be having much luck !

[KRA77]

Did you give the VM more than 2GB memory ? Allways start with less than 2GB to get it working.

[crankshaft]

Sadly, no it was set to 2GB, I just changed to 1GB and get the same immediate BSOD when selecting the passthrough.

Quickly running out of ideas now.

[kingsteve82]

I didn't have good stability until I upgraded all the way to 5.5 tbh. Setting up the vCenter appliance and getting web client working took a little time but I have a VM booting with 8GB RAM running accellerated apps in XenApp reliably now.

I was having loads of problems with the passthrough card not being used for the remote apps, instead being load balanced with the VMware display adapter. Through some iterative troubleshooting (AKA trial and error), I found that if I booted the VM with the VMware display adapter enabled, and then disabled it after Windows starts up, then everything runs over the passthrough card. And if I enabled the VMware adapter prior to rebooting the VM, it rebooted without going to the 'safe mode' adapter. So I set out to automate this.

When I tried removing vmware tools altogether and deleting that vmware display adapter, I ended up with a 'Standard VGA adapter' getting added and my FirePro display was not recognized at all.

My current workaround is to use the microsoft utility DevCon and scripting - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272

I ended up not using the download from that site... had to find a true 64-bit version, not the itanium version they provide.

I have used devcon to identify the device id, and it can then be used to disable or enable the device. In this case, the vmware display adapter. So I've ended up with two scripts, a shutdown script that enables the vmware adapter prior to restarting the server, and a startup script (stored in ProgramData startup path) that disables the vmware adapter after windows boots. In testing, this seems to be working reliably with the remote apps using the FirePro card 100%

[janshien1]

Downgrade to 5.0. Worked for me

Joe

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

From: crankshaft

Sent: Monday, December 2, 2013 6:31 AM

To: Anshien, Joe

Reply To: communities-emailer

Subject: New message: "VMDirectPath and ATI Radeon"

VMware Communities<https://communities.vmware.com/index.jspa>

VMDirectPath and ATI Radeon

created by crankshaft<https://communities.vmware.com/people/crankshaft> in VMware ESXi™ 4 - View the full discussion<https://communities.vmware.com/message/2319213#2319213>

[derickso]

Did you adjust the pci hole?

[kingsteve82]

Is upgrading to ESXi 5.5 an option for you?