I want to build an environment to experiment with Tensorflow. I upgraded Fusion on my Mac because Vmare claims support for IOMMU. The MacPro6,1 has a Falcon Ridge IOMMU
I want to use my eGPU (Akitio Node w/NVIDIA GTX 970) in a Linux VM. I installed Vmware Fusion 10. VM CPU Resources lists IOMMU as an option. There's no documentation on how to use it.
Was Vmware incorrect in listing the option ? If they were I just want a refund. I'll boot Linux baremetal on my Macpro6,1.
I'd prefer to create test environments in a VM. Please let me know how to implement IOMMU with Vmware Fusion 10.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970:
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x4
VRAM (Total): 4095 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x13c2
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: VBIOS 84.04.36.00.6e
gMux Version: 4.0.11 [3.2.8]
Thunderbolt Bus 0:
Vendor Name: Apple Inc.
Device Name: Mac Pro
UID: 0x0001000E0014E790
Route String: 0
Firmware Version: 19.2
Domain UUID: C56BEB4A-11DC-015C-AC74-2E5F5AFDA219
Port:
Status: Device connected
Link Status: 0x2
Speed: Up to 20 Gb/s x1
Current Link Width: 0x2
Receptacle: 6
Cable Firmware Version: 1.1.0
Link Controller Firmware Version: 0.13.0
Port:
Status: No device connected
Link Status: 0x7
Speed: Up to 20 Gb/s x1
Current Link Width: 0x1
Receptacle: 5
Link Controller Firmware Version: 0.13.0
AKiTiO Node:
Vendor Name: inXtron
Device Name: AKiTiO Node
Vendor ID: 0x41
Device ID: 0x308
Device Revision: 0x1
UID: 0x00414F41AD70EB00
Route String: 1
Firmware Version: 25.1
Port (Upstream):
Status: Device connected
Link Status: 0x2
Speed: Up to 20 Gb/s x1
Current Link Width: 0x2
Link Controller Firmware Version: 0.36.0
Hello,
The answer is no you cannot pass pci devices on to the VM.
The screen that VMware made there is easy to misread and unfortunately you happened to do so.
Here's a link to another person asking the same question during the preview phase of Fusion 10 and reply from somebody working at VMware.
Enable Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O in this virtual machine
I'd take the "we can do interesting things in the future" with a grain of salt. The feature you are asking for has been asked for since Fusion 2 and from my point of view if VMware introduces it then it would be in a new release, not during a running release.
If you contact support and explain your situation then I expect they'll do a refund without problems.
--
Wil
What Wil said is correct.
Further, the feature is essentially only there to facilitate our VBS feature requirement. (MS Device Guard and Credential Guard).
There are no instructions how to leverage this for other purposes because it is not currently designed to be used for other purposes.
In your case, you'll need to go Bare Metal to get the solution you're after.
Why is Fusion 10 virtualization technology lagging by 5 years ? I know the hardware is capable of IOMMU passthrough. I built an Ubuntu 17.10 install on a thunderbolt attached 480GB SSD for my MacPro6,1. It works fine. I have libvirt running, enabled iommu, I also made the necessary configuration changes to support Falcon Ridge Thunderbolt. I enabled IOMMU and gpu passthrough.I use my AMD D700 compute GPU for graphics in my VM. I guess I'll be going with Linux as my primary os and run macos on libvirt. I have my thunderbolt connected eGPU on 10.11.6 and I am just about done getting the egpu running on Ubuntu 17.10
I think Vmware should take another look at supporting IOMMU passthrough on MacOS.
is an external GPU supported by Apple on that hardware? If not, then I wouldn't expect Fusion to support it.