[vfio-users] Windows 10 guest refuses to boot when passed my NVIDIA graphics card

[Jasen Borisov]

I managed to successfully boot Arch Linux in the VM. Turned out I wasn't
patient enough. With enough waiting, the same VM configuration as before
(including my passthrough NVIDIA *and* EHCI!) booted. But it is
*incredibly* slow. Took over 10 minutes to get to a login prompt, and a
couple of minutes to do its automatic root login. I plugged a USB keyboard
into the hardware port on my PC that belongs to the EHCI controller I
passed to the VM, and the keyboard worked as expected and I could type
inside the VM. I managed to mount a filesystem and dump `dmesg` to a file,
so I can get it on my desktop. Here is a pastebin of it:
https://bpaste.net/show/e6970c05aff5

This makes me think that *maybe* if I leave Windows to boot overnight, next
morning I might be surprised by a desktop :)

Anyway, it is unacceptably slow, and I would appreciate any help to improve
the situation.

I noticed a lot of errors regarding msrr, both in the host and guest dmesg,
so I guess it would probably be a good idea to add that KVM option you
mentioned. However, I doubt that that is the cause of the performance
problems. When I remove all VFIO devices and replace them with emulated
ones, Arch Linux is very fast (or rather, normal, just very fast in
comparison) despite the same msrr errors appearing.

Any ideas?

On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 11:37 PM, Alex Williamson <
alex.l.williamson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Jasen Borisov <tajjada at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes, I have tried passing only the GPU without the EHCI controller.
>> Still, same problem. My ultimate goal is to run Windows 8.1 or Windows 10
>> on this virtual machine with the NVIDIA drivers for gaming. But, since
>> Windows didn't boot, I decided to try booting Linux for testing, until I am
>> sure that VFIO works, and then deal with Windows.
>>
>> I see the Tianocore logo. The EFI shell works fine too.
>>
>> If I am trying to boot Windows, the Windows logo appears on the screen
>> (but not the spinning dots loading indicator) and freezes there. Sometimes,
>> the spinning dots eventually appear, but only for a few seconds, after
>> which the system resets --> back to Tianocore screen.
>> If I am trying to boot the Arch Linux liveiso, the Gummiboot menu appears
>> successfully, but when I select the option to boot Arch Linux, the screen
>> just goes black and nothing appears after that, so I never see any video
>> output from the actual Arch Linux system.
>>
>
> So how about adding a serial port to the VM redirected to a file
> (virt-manager can do this all point-n-clicky) and then specify
> console=ttyS0,115200n8 on the Linux guest.  If you don't get any output,
> you may need to further enable early console output,
> earlycon=uart,io,0x3f8,115200n8
>
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