[SOLVED] Windows 10 VM freezing after a while with PCI-E GPU passthrough

[Stefa168]

Hi everyone,

I've been experimenting a bit with Proxmox for the last few months to see if it can be useful for my use case (home automation and security).

In this time I have tried preparing a Windows 10 VM to run some NVR software, which benefits a lot from using a GPU for hardware video encoding and decoding. Also, I need CUDA support to be able to run some AI models for object recognition.

Lately, after a lot of trial and error, I've followed this guide https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/b5xpua/the_ultimate_beginners_guide_to_gpu_passthrough/ to get GPU passthrough to work.

My main issue right now, is that whatever I do, when I add the GPU on the VM's hardware, after a couple minutes of running the VM it simply freezes, and I'm not able to recover it in any way. After starting it again, it doesn't even pass the OS loading screen, where it gets stuck.

I'm not sure what could be the problem; I'm not very experienced with this kind of stuff, and if it were for me, I'd go 100% GNU/Linux, however in this case I'm forced to use Windows.

This is my current configuration:

agent: 1
boot: order=ide0;ide2;net0
cores: 4
hostpci0: 0000:01:00,pcie=1
ide0: local-lvm:vm-101-disk-0,size=256G
ide2: local:iso/virtio-win-0.1.229.iso,media=cdrom,size=522284K
machine: pc-q35-7.1
memory: 8192
meta: creation-qemu=7.1.0,ctime=1677192941
name: windows-server
net0: e1000=A6:DF:0E:20:DF:D0,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
numa: 0
ostype: win10
smbios1: uuid=1249b81e-a4bc-4466-ad04-f7cd2d0423e7
sockets: 1
usb0: host=0781:5595
vmgenid: 3be1c9a3-0ec3-47fa-a7c4-d927b3df60e5

Also, I noticed that /dev/mapper/pve-root is full and after looking at the culprit it looks like syslog is full of the same error (vfio-pci 0000:01:00.0: BAR 1: can't reserve [mem 0x4000000000-0x400fffffff 64bit pref]). Could it be a coincidence?

Does anybody have any clue that could help me? If anything is needed, I can get it asap. Thanks!

 

[leesteken]

Also, I noticed that /dev/mapper/pve-root is full and after looking at the culprit it looks like syslog is full of the same error (vfio-pci 0000:01:00.0: BAR 1: can't reserve [mem 0x4000000000-0x400fffffff 64bit pref]). Could it be a coincidence?

You need this work-around when you passthrough the GPU that is used during boot, since kernel 5.13 (Proxmox 7.1).

 

[Stefa168]

You need this work-around when you passthrough the GPU that is used during boot, since kernel 5.15 (Proxmox 7.2).

THANKS!!!! Indeed replacingvideo=efifb:off with initcall_blacklist=sysfb_init in /etc/default/grub completely solved the issue!

Thanks again, and have a great day!