Supern00b question: missing vfio pci module

[fuztec25]

Hello everybody, Davide from Italy here.
I'm so pleased to use a proxmox 8. Never used your software and, what a miss!!! As a testing developer this system is second to none!!!

Well, you know, i wanted to upgrade my old notebook and gifted myself of a newer platform: a supermicro rack computer, extremely powerful!!!

Machine is composed of a SuperMicro X11SPI-Tf mainboard, 128 GB RAM, Xeon Silver 4212r CPU and a 256 GB nVME boot drive. Case is a 24 HDD hotswap SAS/SATA backplane connected with a LSI RAID card.

Ok the installation of Proxmox is flawless (using the latest 8.1). Installed OpenMediaVault as a NAS server and here comes the problem: i need to passthrough the LSI RAID card and the drives connected to. Now, after configuring the VM for OpenMediaVault, when i add a PCI device, Proxmox replies: missing VFIO pci module!

What have I to do to "present" the RAID card to the OpenMediaVault virtual machine?

Thank you so very much in advance for your kind replies.

Regards,
Davide.

 

[leesteken]

There is a manual that describes the steps (and the vfio-pci module): https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_pci_passthrough
Which steps did you do, what problems did you encounter and what needs clarification?

 

[fuztec25]

Thank You Leesteken for your extremely fast reply: the mainboard is IOMMU and DMAR compliant: the only problem found is that groups are all set to "-1" (so not grouped). Can this be a cause of the failure?

 

[leesteken]

Thank You Leesteken for your extremely fast reply: the mainboard is IOMMU and DMAR compliant: the only problem found is that groups are all set to "-1" (so not grouped). Can this be a cause of the failure?

The error is probably because vfio-pci is not loaded (and the manual explains how to do that).
All IOMMU groups number -1 sounds like IOMMU is not enabled. Are you using an Intel system? Is VT-d enabled in the BiOS? Is intel_iommu=on active (check with cat /proc/cmdline)?

 

[fuztec25]

Hello Leeksten and again, thank You so very much for your support!
First of all you were right! After setting intel_iommu=on the mapping started to work as expected but the real solution, as you guessed, was to setup vfio-pci correctly. Just in case someone should have the same problem, i'll post the solution for my peculiar case...

The RAID card is an LSI/Broadcom 9280-24i4e. It's a 6G RAID card.
After logging on pve, i just added to /etc/modules the following:

vfio vfio_iommu_type1 vfio_pci mpt2sas mpt3sas

And then the RAID CARD had been passthrough'ed to the OpenMediaVault's VM .conf file with the following parameters:

hostpci0: 0000:17:00.0,pcie=1,rombar=0

0000:17:00.0 is the ID assigned to my card (yours may vary).

Again, thank you SO VERY MUCH for hinting me to the point!!!

Regards from Italy,
Davide.