Slow Boot After Passing Through PCI Device - Extended Duration SeaBIOS Screen Displayed

[theprez1980]

Hey All -

Haven't ran into this before and am unsure on where to even begin.

Equipment used is a 1U SuperMicro Server (X9 Board with E5-2667v2 CPUs) - all known options to enable PCI Passthrough appear to be supported (it works in the VM even, but is slow to boot).

Upon adding a PCI device under Hardware, and attempting to boot the OS - it will display the SeaBIOS boot screen for a longer duration than normal.

The device is an LSI/Broadcom 2308 HBA card.

Any ideas where to begin? It appears to work, but it's not normal boot behavior I'm used to.

Thanks

 

[leesteken]

Equipment used is a 1U SuperMicro Server (X9 Board with E5-2667v2 CPUs) - all known options to enable PCI Passthrough appear to be supported (it works in the VM even, but is slow to boot).

Upon adding a PCI device under Hardware, and attempting to boot the OS - it will display the SeaBIOS boot screen for a longer duration than normal.

The device is an LSI/Broadcom 2308 HBA card.

When using PCI(e) passthrough, all memory must be pinned into actual host RAM, so maybe that takes some time (maybe other stuff needs to be swapped out)? Maybe test this by starting the VM with a absolute minimal amount of memory and see if it starts faster.
Maybe the HBA card takes a lot of time to initialize or check the drives (for boot ability)? Maybe test this by passing through some other device (which is in it's own IOMMU group and known to work with passthrough).

EDIT: Check the Proxmox System log (or journalctl) for error or other messages around the time of starting the VM for clues.

 

[theprez1980]

When using PCI(e) passthrough, all memory must be pinned into actual host RAM, so maybe that takes some time (maybe other stuff needs to be swapped out)? Maybe test this by starting the VM with a absolute minimal amount of memory and see if it starts faster.
Maybe the HBA card takes a lot of time to initialize or check the drives (for boot ability)? Maybe test this by passing through some other device (which is in it's own IOMMU group and known to work with passthrough).

EDIT: Check the Proxmox System log (or journalctl) for error or other messages around the time of starting the VM for clues.

Thanks for the ideas -

Adjusting memory didn't help - went from 64GB assigned to 4GB, same wait duration
Removing the HBA PCI passthrough and passing through a USB device did not have the same wait. I'm going to chalk this up to perhaps the HBA card is waiting for SMART drive data or information from the drives perhaps.