PCI Passthrough on AMD system *solved*

[schmidtbag]

I have an AMD Athlon II x3, and both my motherboard and CPU support all modern virtualization instruction sets including IOMMU. I run 64 bit Arch Linux. All instruction sets are enabled in BIOS.

I heard about PCI passthrough being a new feature and I'd really like to try it out. According to http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.h ... assthrough it looks like AMD systems with IOMMU are supported, but when I attempt to assign a PCI device to a guest I get this:

Code: Select all

VBoxManage modifyvm "Test OS" --pciattach 08:00.0@01:05.0
VBoxManage: error: Host PCI attachment only supported with ICH9 chipset
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_INVALID_ARG (0x80070057), component SessionMachine, interface IMachine, callee nsISupports
Context: "AttachHostPciDevice(iHostAddr, iGuestAddr, TRUE)" at line 2266 of file VBoxManageModifyVM.cpp

How do I fix this?


I'd like to point out that what I'm attempting to do is assign a GPU that is not being used by the host to be assigned to the guest. In the guest OS, I'll install the drivers for the reassigned GPU. I'm expecting that if this works I'll need a separate monitor. I tried a regular PCI device and that too did not work, so I know it isn't just simply a GPU issue.

[stefan.becker]

If i read the message right, you must set the guest chipset to ich9 instead of piix3.

[schmidtbag]

Awesome thanks, that solved that problem. But now I'm at a new one. When I run the VM, I now get the error:

Code: Select all

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Test OS.
One of the kernel modules was not successfully loaded. Make sure that no kernel modules from an older version of VirtualBox exist. Then try to recompile and reload the kernel modules by executing '/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup' as root (VERR_SUPDRV_COMPONENT_NOT_FOUND).

I don't have '/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup', so how do I fix this?

[Perryg]

If you don't have "/etc/init.d/vboxdrv" then it can not be an official VirtualBox install. Meaning that you have a distro install which has been changed and compiled by them. Short of removing and installing again you would need to ask the actual Distro for the proper instructions.

[schmidtbag]

This is one of those reasons why I hate Arch - it's one of the only distros where files and packages are changed, moved, removed, or combined for no helpful reason. Thankfully there's more than 1 virtualbox 4.1.2 release in the AUR so hopefully the other one works. If not, I'll take this question to the Arch forums.

Thanks for your help.

[mh0]

I know this is an old post, but for future googlers, that error seems to be a result of trying to use pci passthrough with the open source version of VirtualBox. Apparently it is only supported in the closed source version.

[Perryg]

I know this is an old post, but for future googlers, that error seems to be a result of trying to use pci passthrough with the open source version of VirtualBox. Apparently it is only supported in the closed source version.

Nope that's not correct at all. It works if you have all of the ingredients that are needed.

Linux host only, CPU & bios support for VT-d, and a kernel compiled to allow IOMMU.

[mpack]

Apparently it is only supported in the closed source version.

And besides, there's no such thing as a closed source version of VirtualBox.