vGPU via SR-IOV passthrough to Ubuntu Remote Desktop

[balthisar]

I don't usually dwell in Linux GUI's, so this may very well be an X issue rather than a passthrough issue.

What I'm trying to accomplish: access an Ubuntu 22..04.03 instance via Microsoft Remote Desktop that's configured with no display but with a vGPU.

My PVE is correctly configured to split my Intel iGPU into 7 functions. They work great in Windows VM's for display over remote desktop (perfectly, in fact), and I used them in headless VM's for QuickSync and other headless functions, and now I want to do the same in an Ubuntu VM with via its native remote desktop.

If I leave a virtual display connected, I can see the gnome desktop in NoVNC and also use Microsoft Remote Desktop to get into the machine.

The i915 driver is working, and dmesg gives me the normal i915 messages in the log after going through the DKMS build process, etc.:

3.259562] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20201103 for 0000:06:10.0 on minor 0

Both vainfo and clinfo give me information dump they usually give me in headless VM's.

When I set the virtual display to None and make the PCI the primary GPU, though, then Remote Desktop complains that it can't connect to my VM. I guess my working assumption is that Xorg is looking for the virtual GPU the virtual display would have used, and just not launching, but as I said, I'm not usually a GUI user so I'm a little ignorant here.

Is there something else I need to configure to have a GPU accelerated remote display? I'm not playing FPS games over vnc, but I still want to get it working.

Thanks!

 

[dcsapak]

i guess the first step would be to connect to the vm when the display is off e.g. with ssh and check the logs/journal to see what exactly does not work/initialize/etc.

 

[atbakken]

I'm not sure if you are aware, but you have to go through the same process of setting up the i915 SR-IOV drivers on the Linux guest like you did on the host. It's essentially the same process as the host with two changes:

GRUB doesn't need any of the IOMMU info or the the max_vfs option it would only need

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet i915.enable_guc=3"

You also would not need to update the /etc/sysfs.conf file to add the sriov_numvfs info.

I hope this helps.