M5A97 R2.0 - GPU passthrough
 

Hi, I wanted to attempt a GPU passthrough on the Asus M5a97 R2.0 (https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M5...pecifications/) motherboard using either mint or kubuntu.

The board consists of 2 PCIe 2.0 slots, a 16x and a 4X. The issue I am having is trying to set the GPU on the 4x slot as the primary adapter for the host OS and use the GPU on the 16X as the pass through device for guest VM.

No matter what I try, the board defaults to the GPU on the 16x as the primary graphics adapter.The only option I found in the BIOS pertaining to this is "Initiate Graphic Adapter = PEG/PCI or PEG/PCI". Changing this doesn't seem to make a difference.

I saw from forums that people had success with GPU pass through on this board but they didn't mention which PCIe slot was used to perform the pass through. Did anyone have any experience/ success with using the 16x slot to perform the GPU pass through.

*wasn't sure if to post this in the hardware or Virtualization forum.

Welcome to LQ!

I'd start with disabling the output for host OS. See How to force enabling or disabling a connector?

Unfortunately I am having no luck with this. I also tried black listing the GPU on the 16X slot based on guides I found online (eg: http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/thre...-vfio.1371980/) but also had no luck.

I have an AMD r9 390 on the 16x slot and a Nvidia 610 on the 4x slot. I have a dual input monitor where the AMD card is connected to the HDMI input of the monitor and the Nvidia card connected to the VGA input of the monitor. I wanted to have the 390 used as the pci passthrough on KVM to a windows guest while the nvidia 610 would be used for the linux host.

I have been attempting this on both KDE mint 17.3 and Kubuntu 16.04. Currently using Kubuntu for this and given the current issues with AMD drivers and the latest Ubuntu version, I have about 10s to hit clt+alt+F1 before the display crashes. This is the only way I can make any changes to the system.

Once Kubuntu boots I can switch between the 2 inputs, the main desktop on the 390(DVI) and the extended on the 610(VGA) for a short while before the display crashes. No matter what I try, the DVI(R9 390)remains active. At one point running "dmesg | grep pci-stubs" show the 390 being claimed but the HDMI(390) display still worked when this happened????

I guess what I can try as a test is to probably try to pass the Nvida 610 on to a guest and see if that works. If I am successful with that, I am guessing that i have to use the device on the 4x slot to perform a pci pass through, well at least for a GPU ayway.