Hi folks,
i am currently scratching my head over a somewhat really weird problem and i am making zero progress on this past a really painful workaround.
Let me elaborate on the topic, just for the sake of it:
I was running a ATI HD4870 with VMDirectPath in a Windows 7 SP1 x64 Guest under ESXi 5.1u2 with VT-d for a coupe of months without any issues.
Lately i decided to upgrade the card to something more recently and energy efficient and was initially aiming for a NVIDIA GTX 750Ti, despite the fact that i didn't had much success getting a NVIDIA consumer-card to work (which was a GTX 480 if i recall this properly) prior to setting up the ATI HD4870 under 5.1u2 - and i didn't had much success with NVIDIA this time either, in fact everything i have seen during testing of the 750Ti was like a "deja vu" (Code 43, no picture, NVIDIA Control Panel APPCRASH, incomplete stats in GPU-Z due to the card not completely initializing, etc etc) so pretty much like what i have "learned" about ESXi w/ NVIDIA consumer-cards will trying to get the GTX 480 to work a good year ago...bad memories
So i was again looking towards ATI - a HD7790 with a Bonaire XT this time.
Since everything was already in place from my previous setup (IRQs aligned, primary/secondary display controller configured) i didn't had much trouble getting the ATI card up and passed-through to a fresh vmx-09 VM with Windows 7 x64 SP1 as the guest OS followed by:
* installing VMware Tools (custom installation w/o SVGA driver as i recalled getting a BSOD will installing ATI Catalyst if the vGPU wasn't running Microsoft WDDM - even though this seems to be fixed in ESXi 5.5)
* guest reboot #1
* installing ATI Catalyst
* guest reboot #2
* installing VMware SVGA-driver (to get the ATI card activated)
* guest reboot #3
After all this i...
* attached a monitor to the ATI card
* set it as the primary display
* disabled the vmrc console (to fully utilize the dedicated gpu)
so just like i did with my previous setup and in fact everything seemed to work just like before.
Now here comes the bummer:
Whenever i reboot the VM the monitor gets blank, the vmrc console reactivated and looking in the Device Manager of the VM the ATI card is marked with a yellow exclamation mark and the dreaded Code 43 "Windows has detected an issue and disabled the hardware"-Curse and so far the only way to get the card working again is by rebooting the entire Host/Hypervisor, at least until i reboot the VM again and the progress starts all over again.
Thinks i did try so far without any sign of success:
* Disabling the Onboard GPU
* Reserving all Memory to the VM
* Playing around with pcie.hole parameter (even through i am only using 2GB vRAM in this VM)
* Setting Physical Mode to IOAPIC (pciPassthru0.msiEnabled = "FALSE")
* Setting the reset method of the card to flr/d3d0/link/bridge using /etc/vmware/passthru.map (as i initially though this had to be some problem with ESXi not "properly" resetting the card during VM reboot)
Looking into the vmk*.logs in /var/logs doesnt provide any usable information either, no errors logged, it's just like the card is working completely fine, at least for the Hypervisor.
So despite rolling back to ESXi 5.1u2 - without any guarantee of success - i am currently running out of options.
Any ideas much appreciated
Thanks for reading.
Cheers!