Arch Linux

el.Quero

Member

Registered: 2014-11-15

Posts: 19

Get IOMMU/PCI passthrough working on Virtualbox - i7 laptop

Hi! As the subject suggest I'm trying to enable IOMMU on my laptop. I tried to follow some tutorials, like:

• https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09. … assthrough

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PC … h_via_OVMF

• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768

and some other suggestions I found by googling, but without result. To be more exact I followed only the parts related to enabling IOMMU, not the hypervisor-specific parts.

Obviously, before starting, I checked if my CPU and MB chipset support IOMMU.

At the moment I've a "vanilla" and updated Arch (so no strange packages and kernels installed) with this customizations:

• kernel parameters:

  intel_iommu=on pci-stub.ids=10de:1391 i915.enable_hd_vgaarb=1

• "pci-stub" added to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf MODULES row;

• VM with device attached like suggested in Virtualbox guide.

Dmesg output:

[    0.000000] Intel-IOMMU: enabled
[    1.800669] vboxpci: IOMMU not found (not registered)
[  105.797172] vboxpci: No IOMMU domain (attach)
[  113.046707] vboxpci: No IOMMU domain (detach)

I noticed that there isn't an unique tutorial, like a wiki entry, for enabling IOMMU on multiple platforms/hypervisors, so I posted in the forum... If I could solve this problem I could start it, although I do not think I have all the knowledge that could have other people here. Maybe they will join the wiki discussion

Basic-Master

Member

Registered: 2007-10-30

Posts: 21

Re: Get IOMMU/PCI passthrough working on Virtualbox - i7 laptop

If it was that simple! A while ago I wanted to pass-through my ATI graphics card to a VM, however VirtualBox's developers explicitly state that this mode is not supported. Hence I guess this won't be possible with your nVidia graphics card either. I'd appreciate to see a solution for this, but I tried several approaches (including qemu, which didn't work properly on my machine either) so I gave up at some time.

It will work if you try to pass-through a simple PCI device (like a networking adapter, for which this feature was actually designed), but as I said this is unfortunately impossible for graphics adapters. If you try to use this feature for simpler devices, you won't really need to use pcistub either. AFAIR VirtualBox automatically unloads the appropriate drivers and attaches them to the VM while starting it up.

Last edited by Basic-Master (2015-06-04 10:20:27)

jimmydafletch

Member

Registered: 2013-03-01

Posts: 2

Re: Get IOMMU/PCI passthrough working on Virtualbox - i7 laptop

I have read that some motherboards have a poor implementation of VT-d, that cause IOMMU to not work as it should. Some have been fixed by BIOS updates.