ESXi GPGPU issues with passthrough on dual GPU cards

[padrino122]

I read a few weeks ago about the GPGPU VT-d based passthrough on ESXi and how it's working well for a number of GPUs. I decided to jump on it and bring some of our stand alone systems into our vShpere environment however I'm having some issues during testing.

Any single GPU card works fine because when I I enable passthrough ESXi correctly picks up the PCIe root device (the dependent parent).

On dual GPU cards the card itself has it's own local bus inline before the system's PCIe parent, ESXi assumes it only needs to pass through the first parent, which in this case is the bus on the card itself but not the system PCIe bus.

Does anyone know how I can work around this by editing the system configuration manually or via some other method. I need to get ESXI to step up the device tree to the system PCIe bus like it does on single GPU cards.

[PUREJOY]

As far as I can tell, ESX don't support GPU passthru. One could argue this is no different than PCI passthru but I think the hypervisor need to be aware of the device before we could do passthru.

--Ravi

[padrino122]

Thanks for the note...

It actually works fine for single GPUs and VMware has tested many themselves, the issue I have is specifically limited to multi GPU cards and the logic that it's the immediate parent as teh dependent vs. the bus parent.

[padrino122]

Just touching the thread again to see if there has been any movement, at this point I'm wondering if the tree defined in the UI is in a configruation file somewhere, I'm hoping I can try a manual edit and see what works if I assign the proper parent to the VM.

[Vinzz]

hey Padrino122,

     I'm trying to use nVidia Tesla C2050 card in the VM. When I enable passthrough in advanced settings of vClient it asks me to reboot.

After I reboot the vSphere server5 (ESXi) hungs up at cnic_registry and I will not be able to power on the VM in client after adding the PCI-e devices to the VM.

Would like to know how u succeeded in using GPU card in the VM.

[DaMule]

Hi All,

I am experiencing exactly the same challenge as Vinzz with ESXi and a nVidia GeForce GT 440. This card has multiple GPU's and after adding the hardware to the Guest, the Guest fails to post on boot, remving the PCIe device allows it to boot successfully. Any help is appreciated.