[vfio-users] Checking for EFI and general questions

[Jens Zimmermann]

Hello everybody!

First of all, this is my first time using a mailing list so please excuse
any mistakes I may do.

Second, I would like to thank you for all the effort (code, blogs, wiki,
mailing lists, forum posts)! They have been very helpful to me already.

Third, although I know a bit about PCs and I have been using Linux for two
years now, I am still pretty much beginner skilled, so please keep that in
mind. :-)

So why I am here is because I really love the idea of running Windows in a
VM using GPU Passthrough as I need both operating systems and rebooting is
pretty annoying. I have spent dozens of hours reading already and my first
actual move was to test my GPU for EFI compatibility following this guide:
http://vfio.blogspot.de/2014/08/does-my-graphics-card-rom-support-efi.html

It seems that I got it working, but the output is missing the interesting
part unfortunately:

~/rom-parser$ ./rom-parser /tmp/image.rom
Valid ROM signature found @0h, PCIR offset 190h
    PCIR: type 0 (x86 PC-AT), vendor: 10de, device: 1380, class: 030000
    PCIR: revision 0, vendor revision: 1
Error, ran off the end

I have tried using the EfiRom from edk2, but I can't get that working. I am
on Xubuntu 14.04, Kernel 3.13.0-68-generic.

Is the rom file fine and it's just that I can't read it? In that case I
have uploaded it here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B55lD85ONMbdSWJNZmF5TU9aZTA
If the rom is broken also I'd appreciate any tips how to get it working.

Ultimately I would like to know your opinion whether you think that running
a Win with GPU  and possibly USB, audio etc Passthrough is doable for a
beginner or not? I have read the guides and I understand most of it, but if
any problem occurs I will be pretty much helpless I guess. I am going to
get a new PC for Christmas, but Haswell-E is not affordable for me, so I
could go with Haswell since Skylake seems to be rather bad. Also I have got
two nvidia GPUs (750 Ti, the one I tried to get the EFI info from and a 210
GT).

Thank you for reading! Any reply would be much appreciated! :-)

Kind regards,

Jens
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