Enable & Using vGPU Passthrough

This gist is almost entirely not unlike Derek Seaman's awesome blog:

Proxmox VE 8: Windows 11 vGPU (VT-d) Passthrough with Intel Alder Lake

As such please refer to that for pictures, here i will capture the command lines I used as i sequence the commands a little differently so it makes more logic to me.

This gists assumes you are not running ZFS and are not passing any other PCIE devices (as both of these can require addtional steps - see Derek's blog for more info)

This gist assumes you are not running proxmox in UEFI Secure boot - if you are please refer entirely to dereks blog.

ALSO pleas refere to the comments section as folks have found workarounds and probably corrections (if the mistakes remain in my write up it is because i have't yet tested the corrections)

Note:i made no changes to the BIOS defaults on the Intel Nuc 13th Gen. This just worked as-is.

this gist is part of this series

Preparation

Install Build Requirements

apt update && apt install pve-headers-$(uname -r)
apt install git sysfsutils dkms build-* unzip -y

Install Other Drivers / Tools

This allow you to run vainfo, intel_gpu_top for testing and non-free versions of the encoding driver - without this you will not AFAIK be able to encoding with this GPU. This was missed in EVERY guide i saw for this vGPU, so not sure, but i had terrible issues until i did this.

edits the sources list with nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add the following lines:

#non-free firmwares
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm non-free-firmware

#non-free drivers and components
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm non-free

and save the file

apt update && apt install intel-media-va-driver-non-free intel-gpu-tools vainfo

This next step copies a driver missing on proxmox installs and will remove the -2 error for this file in dmesg.

wget -r -nd -e robots=no -A '*.bin' --accept-regex '/plain/' https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/i915/adlp_dmc.bin

cp adlp_dmc.bin /lib/firmware/i915/

Compile and Install the new driver

Clone github project

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/strongtz/i915-sriov-dkms.git

modify dkms.conf

cd i915-sriov-dkms
nano dkms.conf

change these two lines as follows:

PACKAGE_NAME="i915-sriov-dkms"
PACKAGE_VERSION="6.5"

save the file

Compile and Install the Driver

cd ~
mv i915-sriov-dkms/ /usr/src/i915-sriov-dkms-6.5
dkms install --force -m i915-sriov-dkms -v 6.5

and use dkms status to verify the module is now installed

Modify grub

edit the grub fle with nano /etc/default/grub

change this line in the file

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on iommu=pt i915.enable_guc=3 i915.max_vfs=7"

note: if you have already made modifications to this line in your grub file for other purposes you should also still keep those items

finally run

update-grub
update-initramfs -u

Find PCIe Bus and update sysfs.conf

use lspci | grep VGA t find the bus number

you should see something like this:

root@pve2:~# lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04)

take the number on the far left and add to the sysfs.conf as follows - note all the proceeding zeros on the bus path are needed

echo "devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/sriov_numvfs = 7" > /etc/sysfs.conf

REBOOT

Testing On Host

check devices

check devices with dmesg | grep i915

the last two lines should read as follows:

[    7.591662] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20201103 for 0000:00:02.7 on minor 7
[    7.591818] i915 0000:00:02.0: Enabled 7 VFs

if they don't then check all steps carefully

Validate with VAInfo

validate with vainfo you should see no errors (note this needs the drivers and tool i said to install at the top) and vainfo --display drm --device /dev/dri/cardN where N is a number from 0 to 7 - this will show you the acceleration endpoints for each VF

Check you can monitor the VFs - if not you have issues

monitor any VF renderer in real time with intel_gpu_top -d drm:/dev/dri/renderD128 there is one per VF - to see them all use ls -l /dev/dri

Configure vGPU Pool in Proxmox

1. navigate to Datacenter > Resource Mappings
2. click add in PCI devices
3. name the pool something like vGPU-Pool
4. map all 7 VFs for pve 1 but NOT the root device i.e 0000:00:02.x not 0000:00:02
5. click create
6. on the created pool lcikc the plus button next to vGPU-Pool
7. select mapping on node = pve 2, ad all devices and click create
8. repeat for pve3

The pool should now look like this:

Note: machines with PCI pass through devices cannot be live migrated, they must be shutdown, migrated offline to the new node and then started.

EVERYTIME THE KERNEL IS UPDATED IN PROXMOX YOU SHOULD DO THE FOLLOWING

update the kernel using proxox ui
dkms install -m i915-sriov-dkms -v 6.5 --force
reboot