Xeon E3-1220 v5 - PCI Passthrough

[bryce]

I've got an Xeon E3-1220 v5 and I'm having some issues getting pci passthrough to work with it.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough

I've flashed my HBA (M1015) to IT mode, plugged it in with the drives. Followed the steps to enable IOMMU groups, etc. No errors, the console says it supports IOMMU groups and all. But after following all the steps my VM is unable to see the drives attached to this card.

I've searched the forums and have found a few things on it and apparently it's got to do with my cpu being a skylake variant. Is there any workaround to getting this to work so I can switch from FreeNAS to Proxmox and have my card passed through to FreeNAS so it has direct access to my hard drives?

Or am I just screwed until support is added (saw it was added in the 4.7 kernel).

One more thing, there was a post that mentioned a patch being added to Proxmox, but apparently that was removed for some reason, anyone know why that patch was removed?

 

[Vito Reiter]

If I am reading this right you're trying to run FreeNAS in a VM? My absolute recommendation here is to have FreeNAS as its own box, with your HBA in it (Which should already treat the disks separately but you should look for a JBOD mode) make an NFS Share dataset and leave it. Go into ProxMox, add a storage device as an NFS share to your whole cluster and you're ready to rock n' roll.

Any form of ZFS should have direct access to disks without it being necessary to pass through devices as you add a single point of failure for your pool. Also, I believe you can create a ZFS dataset on a ProxMox node directly or use ceph? Either way, ZFS needs to have direct access without modifications to disks.

 

[bryce]

I'm well aware of having it in it's own box. This is why I am passing through the HBA to the proxmox vm for FreeNAS, that way it has access to the drives as if it's on it's own box.

My issue is getting a workaround for my skylake cpu so I can have the dedicated IOMMU groups for my HBA and all.

 

[bryce]

Ok, I get to this step in the wiki I linked above

# find /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/ -type l

I get no results back from it. Does that mean my CPU doesn't support dedicated IOMMU groups even though the ecap response gave me a code saying it does support it?