[vfio-users] [BUG, HELP NEEDED] No signal (Invalid ROM) with some Asus Nvidia cards

[Nicolas Roy-Renaud]

I've been wanting to report this one for a while, but I was hoping I 
could gather some more information first to have a clear idea of what's 
wrong. Hopefully some people on the mailing list will be able to help us 
solve this.

The guest GPU I'm using on my current VFIO machine is an Asus-made GTX 
970 (GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5). Although the BIOS is supposed to support UEFI 
(none of those on TechPowerUp do, but running GPU-Z on a base-metal 
Windows install proves mine actually does), whenever I try to perform a 
firmare dump from linux with the vfio driver or boot a VM that should 
claim this card, I get an "|Invalid ROM contents|" error. Last month, 
someone else came here asking about a similar issue, and I realized 
after asking a few questions that he was trying to pass an Asus-made GTX 
750 (GTX750TI-PH-2GD5). As it turned out, he was experiencing the exact 
same issue I had before and managed to work around it using the same 
procedure.

As it turns out, the problem can be avoided when mounting the card on a 
live VM, which somehow bypasses the ROM check and runs without a hitch 
on my machine.

This has me believe that it might be a problem that's specific to Asus 
cards (and perhaps only their Nvidia cards or even just their Maxwell 
cards), but I'm not sure where the problem could possibly come from and 
whether it's related to vfio itself or if it's an issue on Asus' end. 
Either way, I'd need help from someone who's more familiar with vfio 
than I am to help diagnose the issue, or possibly someone else with the 
same isue so we could evaluate how widespread the problem actually is.
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