[vfio-users] Checking for EFI and general questions

[Okky Hendriansyah]

On November 20, 2015 at 00:12:38, Jens Zimmermann (zimmermannjens888 at gmail.com) wrote:
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
Hi Jens, welcome aboard!

Not sure about your ROM image, but looking at [1] it looks like someone has successfully passed through a 750 Ti via OVMF, in other words the card should supports UEFI. If it’s possible I would recommend you to upgrade your kernel to 4.1.x which is currently the most stable kernel for passing through GPU with OVMF (plus you get the newer way to bind the GPU via vfio-pci instead of pci-stub [2][3]).

Alex’s guide is probably

Oh yeah, please make sure to always use reply-all in order for your email to be posted to the mailing list.



[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LnGpTrXalwGVNy0PWJDURhyxa3sgqkGXmvNCIvIMenk/edit#gid=0

[2] http://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/05/vfio-gpu-how-to-series-part-3-host.html

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#vfio-pci

-- 

Okky Hendriansyah

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