Re: Problems using vfio pcie passthrough (pci-assign works)

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2014-10-02 at 07:39 -0600, Bruce Cran wrote:
> I have a PCIe card that's behind an Intel E3-1200 PCIe x16 controller 
> bridge that I want to use in VMs: it works when using the pci-assign 
> driver, but something goes wrong when trying to use vfio-pci - my driver 
> in the guest gets so far through loading before failing to talk to the 
> hardware, so I guess something's not being setup correctly.  I'm 
> wondering if this is a bug (do vfio and OVMF work together?) or a 
> problem with the way I'm setting up vfio-pci. I'm using the script from 
> http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/images/b/b4/2012-forum-VFIO.pdf page 30 to 
> assign the card, but I know it's a fairly old document, and I'm running 
> kernel 3.11 on openSUSE: is it still correct?   Or should I not try to 
> use vfio-pci for now?

What's the device you're trying to assign and the scripts you're using
to do so?  vfio-pci is fully supported, but I'd recommend a kernel newer
than 3.11 (maybe a newer QEMU too, you didn't specify a version) unless
openSUSE is specifically pulling vfio features and fixes into their
distro.  vfio does work with OVMF, most of the testing of this is with
GPU assignment.  It does require an OVMF image built from a fairly
recent tree (not more than a few months old), but if you're getting into
the guest OS you're probably fine.  Provide more details and I can try
to help.  Thanks,

Alex