[SOLVED] Bought my first real server HW (HPE DL380 Gen9) - no IOMMU?! - fail?

[fpdragon]

Hi all,

After several years of good experience in running proxmox on desktop and home machines as kind of home servers, I just decided to buy my first real enterprise server equipment from second hand ebay.

I choose a used:
HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9
BIOS: P89 v2.80 (10/16/2020)
CPUs: 2x Xeon E5-2690 v4
Huge memory, Two powerfull Xeons and many HW addons.

At least for me, this HW is nuts and has pleanty of ressources.

However I still have not managed to get PCI passthrough running.
I do double checked that all available virtualizing features are enabled in BIOS. However, there is no feature that I was able to match with IOMMU?!
On Proxmox itself I should have configured everything right.

So the question is:
Did I miss something?
Does my HW even support IOMMU?
Maybe a newer FW upgrade helps?

I just learned the hard way that HP has awefull support for home users, no usefull changelogs of the BIOS updates on their website, and even worse... one can only download an update with a maintenance contract. O.O At least it would be interesting if the FW upgrades may help in this problem.

First I was very happy with my second hand bought. Solid and very fast HW but as it seems to come out there is a big disadvantage... -_-

Hope someone can help.

 

[leesteken]

I do double checked that all available virtualizing features are enabled in BIOS. However, there is no feature that I was able to match with IOMMU?!

Intel's name for it is VT-d.

On Proxmox itself I should have configured everything right.

What is the output of cat /proc/cmdline?

So the question is:
Did I miss something?

Maybe, see above.

Does my HW even support IOMMU?

Xeon typically does support VT-d, and yours does: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...-processor-e5-2690-v4-35m-cache-2-60-ghz.html
Does the motherboard chipset (which is?) support it? Is intel_iommu=on active (see above)?

Maybe a newer FW upgrade helps?

It often helps (in other ways too) but sometimes it breaks passthrough (mostly on AMD).

I just learned the hard way that HP has awefull support for home users, no usefull changelogs of the BIOS updates on their website, and even worse... one can only download an update with a maintenance contract. O.O At least it would be interesting if the FW upgrades may help in this problem.

First I was very happy with my second hand bought. Solid and very fast HW but as it seems to come out there is a big disadvantage... -_-

HP does have a tendency to require special software to enable IOMMU for each PCI(e) slot, or something (no personal experience). Maybe search the forum a bit (for RMRR for example)?

 

[fpdragon]

oh how embarrassing, I should have known better:

Of course it wasn't the hardware but I configured something stupid in Proxmox.

Here for those who might run in the same problem.

My assumption was that the system was using GRUB. Instead, Proxmox uses System.d on my DL380 with ZFS.

I had to edit the file

nano /etc/kernel/cmdline

and add

intel_iommu=on relax_rmrr iommu=pt

and run

proxmox-boot-tool refresh

reboot

that's all.

thanks for the help and sorry for the stupid question