HBA Passthrough Questions

[Helheim]

I followed some guide I found to setup HBA passthrough to a FreeNAS VM originally and it has been working, however, after reading the guide on the Wiki I'm not so sure I have it setup right. Basically, all I did was enable IOMMU and add the PCI-E device to the VM. After reading the Wiki it sounds like I should have set it up as a q35 system and check the pci-express option? How much difference does that make? Also do I need to do either of these as well?

options vfio-pci ….
blacklist DRIVERNAME

VM:


6:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3 (rev 02)
Subsystem: Super Micro Computer Inc SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3 (AOC-S3008L-L8e)
Physical Slot: 4
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 201, NUMA node 0
I/O ports at 5000
Memory at c6340000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Memory at c6300000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
Expansion ROM at c6200000 [disabled] [size=1M]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [68] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [a8] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable+ 64bit+
Capabilities: [c0] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=96 Masked-
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [1e0] #19
Capabilities: [1c0] Power Budgeting <?>
Capabilities: [190] #16
Capabilities: [148] Alternative Routing-ID Interpretation (ARI)
Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci
Kernel modules: mpt3sas

Thanks

 

[mira]

I think the documentation [0] explains it well.

When passing through a GPU, the best compatibility is reached when using q35 as machine type, OVMF (EFI for VMs) instead of SeaBIOS and PCIe instead of PCI. Note that if you want to use OVMF for GPU passthrough, the GPU needs to have an EFI capable ROM, otherwise use SeaBIOS instead.

The combination of q35 together with pcie and UEFI is mostly needed for certain hardware. So as long as it works with the default machine type and pci instead of pcie, that is fine as well.

[0] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_pci_passthrough