VM: trouble booting after adding HBA passthrough

the_jest

New Member
Jan 14, 2024
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I'm a new Proxmox user, just getting set up with my first install. It's gone well, but I'm now having trouble starting a VM after I added a passthrough HBA to its hardware.

I think I've set up PCI passthrough correctly, and IOMMU and vfio are all activated and show up in my dmesg output.

I created a new VM to run TrueNAS Scale, and installed it, and this initially booted quickly and correctly. I then shut down the VM, and added three PCIe hardware devices: an HBA and two other PCIe hard drives. After this, the VM has trouble booting. When I watch the console, SeaBIOS hangs for some time (showing the SeaBIOS version line, and the Machine UUID), then gives various messages indicating that it's having trouble booting. (It might show an "Initializing..." spinner, maybe a Proxmox logo, then something about an iPXE command line, then something about no boot device being available, then it'll go back to the SeaBIOS version/Machine UUID line.) Sometimes it shows all of the passed-through drives as available, then it can't find the boot disk. (The VM options in Proxmox show "sci0, net0" for the boot options, but apparently sometimes SeaBIOS is attempting to boot from the passed-through drives, which are _not_ selected as boot options.)

I've tried rebooting a number of times; once and only once it _did_ go through to the installed TrueNAS, and everything looked fine--all the passed-through disks were visible to it. But when I rebooted the VM, it once again hung for a while and then got stuck in the same loop. I've also tried deleting the VM entirely and installing it, with the same result--it's fast and successful until I add the passed-through devices, then it gets stuck at boot.

Running TrueNAS is in fact my main purpose for this installation, so I'd love to figure out how to get this to work. I can do my best to provide additional information about my setup. Thank you.
 
Followup, after some more experimentation: It's just the HBA that causes this. If I pass through the two other PCIe drives, it boots right up. If I only pass through the HBA, it hangs. (And to clarify, this is hanging before the VM boots into TrueNAS.)

What should I be looking at, to figure out why the HBA is triggering this?
 
In case anyone comes across this later, the answer is that I needed to set `rombar=0` in the hardware settings for this device in the VM. Discussed in various places, but perhaps best here. Everything is fine now.

Sorry for the lack of clarity in the original message, but I wasn't sure what was going on.
 
confirm this work, read through the post and seem like the firmware issue on the LSI9003 card.
 

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