[vfio-users] No boot screen on Quadro M5000?

[Alex Williamson]

On Sat, 6 Feb 2016 21:56:25 +0000
Bronek Kozicki <brok at spamcop.net> wrote:

> I wonder if anyone else is using Quadro M5000 ; I pulled the trigged on 
> two for my workstation and they work reliably with vfio pass-through 
> (yay, finally no reset issues!), but one thing is missing and I wonder 
> if I'm doing something wrong.
> 
> Windows does boot, GPU works well and the drivers report the card 
> exactly as expected, picture quality and performance is excellent as 
> expected, however Windows boot screen is not displayed. The first screen 
> displayed by passed-through GPU after boot is Windows 7 blue logon 
> screen. When I switched my Windows to the new card, I had to put "<rom 
> bar='off'/>" in libvirt device definition, because otherwise it would   
> not boot.
> 
> FWIW, I am using experimental x-vga=on setup with regular BIOS. I tried 
> installing a new OS with OVMF and vfio passthrough, but so far 
> unsuccessfully. My OVMF machines work with spice, only vfio part does 
> not seem to work for me. However I have not spent much time trying vfio 
> with OVMF with this card yet.

Quadro cards are only supported by NVIDIA in secondary configurations.
Configure an emulated graphics, preferably at a lower address than the
assigned GPU, do not use x-vga.  BIOS and initial boot will occur on
the emulated graphics, depending on the OS version, Windows will either
switch automatically to the assigned GPU once the NVIDIA drivers loads
or it will appear as a dual-graphics setup and you can disable the
emulated graphics in device manager.  Thanks,

Alex