Does GPU upgrade require reinstallation of Proxmox?

[dtk]

Hi,

My machine is currently running Proxmox 6.2.4 and I want to upgrade my GPU. If I swap my GPU with the new one, would Proxmox still boot? Is there any tutorial to do the upgrade? The reason why I didn't just swap it out and see if it works is because I did a ram upgrade last month and Proxmox refused to boot, so I had to reinstall everything from scratch.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi,

you normally do not need a reinstallation with most Linux based distributions when adding or changing hardware.

If the new GPU is supported in general it will just work, if you switch vendor (NVIDIA -> AMD, or vice versa) you may need to install drivers/userland packages for that.

FWIW, I switched GPU here from intel iGPU to NVIDIA and now to AMD, never reinstalled anything, just added nvidia non-free drivers on the first time, and dropped them when changing to AMD, as AMD cards have a performant open source driver in the kernel, which works quite good with the 5.4 Kernel from Proxmox VE 6.3

The reason why I didn't just swap it out and see if it works is because I did a ram upgrade last month and Proxmox refused to boot, so I had to reinstall everything from scratch.

That sounds rather weird, a RAM upgrade is mostly transparent for the OS, besides maybe some size changes. There are no RAM drivers or firmware the OS supplies, a re-installation does not changes anything for RAM support (as there's nothing to change), so I'd guess there was something else wrong.

From what current GPU card (vendor, model) to what new GPU (model, vendor) do you plan to switch?
Also, is that GPU for pass-through or the PVE host itself?
That information could help to give more specific directions.

 

[dtk]

From what current GPU card (vendor, model) to what new GPU (model, vendor) do you plan to switch?
Also, is that GPU for pass-through or the PVE host itself?
That information could help to give more specific direction

Right now I have AMD 5700XT as host and plan on switching to AMD 6800xt as host. I will pass-trhough the 6800 for Big Sur and 5700 for Windows 10.

 

[t.lamprecht]

In general this things would be important:
* the two GPUs need to be in different IOMMU groups, else they cannot be passed through to different VMs: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough#Verify_IOMMU_Isolation
* the host must not use (=initialize) those cards, the easiest way to avoid this is blacklisting the AMD modules

For the 5700 card you may run into a "reset bug", see this DKMS module for a workaround, if you run into that issue: https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset

 

[dtk]

In general this things would be important:
* the two GPUs need to be in different IOMMU groups, else they cannot be passed through to different VMs: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough#Verify_IOMMU_Isolation
* the host must not use (=initialize) those cards, the easiest way to avoid this is blacklisting the AMD modules

For the 5700 card you may run into a "reset bug", see this DKMS module for a workaround, if you run into that issue: https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset

After a successful GPU(6800) pass-through, my machine is acting weird, it won't run both VMs simultaneously. When I started one VM, the other one crashed. I only did a pass-through for the 6800.