[vfio-users] Passing through an intregrated Nvidia mobile GPU (NVIDIA Quadro M1000M)

[Mail admin]

I hate to be that guy, but this really isn't anywhere near as complex as
it's being presented. I've passed through the K2100M on my Precision M4800
before, I'll set it up again, but I had stopped work because it required an
external monitor to work properly. I had then set up my desktop instead and
been happy with the results.

Optimus doesn't really have any 'special sauce' making things happen. The
OS and drivers do a lot of the work, basically Optimus is just a secondary
GPU without directly connected I/Os (ideally). The firmware tricks are
mainly to keep the OS from trying to bring up the secondary GPU as a
primary one. You can see traits of this via lspci. The Intel GPU shows as a
VGA controller, the Nvidia GPU shows as a "3D controller", which I had last
seen in Linux in reference to a 3Dfx Voodoo2.

I'll try to get this running again on my M4800 and take
notes/screenshots/etc to assist.

Someone suggested disabling Optimus. Do *not* do this. Your job will become
massively more complex. Disabling Optimus on the Precision laptops disables
the Intel GPU almost entirely and uses it only to connect the outputs. The
Nvidia GPU will be fully functional and identified normally, and will be
providing all of your graphical output. This can make it much more
complicated to control the host OS.

I believe most of the difficulty I had was related to the lscpi issues I
described above, the PCI IDs are changed when Optimus is enabled, and I
believe this is the issue that is causing your problems. I can't recall,
I'll need to check my laptop, but I believe I had spoofed the
single-GPU-no-Optimus PCI IDs along with passing the device, but I'll have
to check.

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Alex Williamson <
alex.l.williamson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nobody has successfully assigned an Optimus GPU to a guest yet, afaik.
> These hybrid laptops are not simply an integrated and discrete GPU in the
> same case with the ability to switch between them, there are proprietary
> BIOS requirements that we cannot replicate in open source firmware to make
> that happen and it's not clear if there's any way to make the GPU work
> independently of those features.  If you can make it work, document what
> you've done, but don't expect that it should just work.  Good luck.
>
> _______________________________________________
> vfio-users mailing list
> vfio-users at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/attachments/20160331/abf8798a/attachment.htm>