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headhead
Contributor
Contributor

Radeon 6800 eGPU not showing up in Ubuntu 20.04.3 (64-bit) guest with 'Prefer External GPU' checked

- 2018 Mac Mini

- Sonnet 750 eGPU box (thunderbolt)

- Radeon 6800 16GB

- Big Sur 11.5.2 (host)

- Fusion 12.1.2

- Ubuntu 20.04.3 (guest)

(I own Fusion 11, but if I can get this all working I'll upgrade to 12. For this initial test, Fusion 12 is the trial version)

macOS recognizes the GPU. Fusion also seems to recognize it as suddenly the 'prefer external gpu' checkbox appeared in display settings. I checked it and started the VM.

But glxinfo | egrep -i 'device|memory' only shows:

Device: SVGA3D; build: RELEASE; LLVM; (0x405)
Video memory: 1MB
Unified memory: no

I installed the drivers as 'headless' so that may explain the glxinfo output, but ethminer and PhoenixMiner both say there are no suitable GPU's installed.

I have downloaded and installed amdgpu-pro-21.30-1290604-ubuntu-20.04.tar.xz using:./amdgpu-pro-install --opencl=rocr --headless -y

I (also?) installed rocm, but I can't remember if that was included in the above installer or a separate one.

This is all brand new gear and software and the GPU was pulled from a working linux mining machine an hour ago which uses the exact same version of PhoenixMiner day in day out. (just no eGPU or VM)

I'm obviously doing something wrong here. Any idea what I'm missing?

 

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

Not sure why your post ended up in the spam queue, but I pulled it out of there.

re. the eGPU.

The documentation about eGPU support is a bit confusing.
While your VM is able to use the eGPU, it doesn't expose it to the guest.

Let me try and see if I can say that in a less confusing way.
VMware Fusion does not support PCIe passthrough. IOW, you cannot introduce a GPU directly to a guest. The guest will always get a virtual GPU, at best it will be a paravirtual GPU.

As a result you do not get access to be able and run openCL workloads.

So you are not doing something wrong, what you want to do is not supported.

Hope this helps,
--
Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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