Troubles with PCIe passthrough: SSD edition

jrucker

New Member
Dec 24, 2020
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I'm running one of the Sun F80 PCIe SSD cards, and I'm having some troubles accessing it. Here's what I've tried so far:

1. Create storage, and add part of the SSD as a disk in an existing Windows 10 VM. This was working, but was either super slow, or I ran into the same problem I'll describe below (I didn't test this configuration for very long)

2. Pass the SSD through using PCIe passthrough to the existing Windows 10 VM. This worked great, for a few hours, then the drive vanished. It's like it completely disappeared from the VM. The config didn't change, rebooting didn't help. I didn't see any errors in the VM or in the PVE GUI. I don't know where else to look for errors.

3. Pass the SSD through using PCIe passthrough to an ubuntu 20.04 desktop VM. This worked exactly the same as 2. I didn't leave the VM running long enough to see if it vanished while the VM was running, but a reboot caused it to vanish. I stopped the VM, removed the PCIe passthrough, started the VM, then stopped it again. Went to add the PCIe passthrough again, and the machine type had changed from "Q35" to "default" (no idea what's going on there, that didn't happen with the Win10 VM when I removed it). I changed back to Q35, added the PCIe passthrough, started the VM and still nothing, no drive to be found.

I have no idea whats going on, and don't know where to start troubleshooting. Any help would be appreciated.
 
After a bunch more testing, I think I've narrowed it down to the drive slowly dying.
It's not logging any S.M.A.R.T. errors, but I'm getting I/O errors in dmesg... very intermittently.
I moved the drive to a desktop, and it's working slightly more reliably, but at about 1/3 the speed it should be running, I'm guessing the controller is working hard to correct errors, and that's slowing the drive down pretty badly.
 
Welp, maybe not.

Had the same problem as before this morning, but with two different drives: Restarting an ubuntu desktop VM caused them to completely vanish.
 

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