PCIe Pass-through lanes and lane performance

pandusen

@andriy.sultanov said:

@pandusen As Teddy said above, you can't passthrough a PCI bridge, so there's no PCI devices xapi shouldn't omit here.

I am not trying to pass through the bridge only the end points. The Intel arc's have 2 end points: The GPU and the Sound device. "xe pci-list" only reveals the GPU, not the sound device. (this works for nvidia and AMD)

But "going the xen-cmdline way" shouldn't break anything, that's what xe pci-disable-dom0-access does behind the scenes. What issues did you see? Which steps did you follow?

the sound device is available in the lspci list and can be passed through using CLI.
But doing so, (using CLI for passtrough) undoes everything done using xe or the passthrough gui in XO. and results in this:
https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/10609/xcp-ng-8.3-pci-passthrough-issue
so yes, its does break something.

dkidd255

@jamesg @teddyastie, any further findings on this?

I am building an AI Inference server with a handful of Arc Pro B70's and a Supermicro H12SSL-i MOBO + 128GB of ram. I was hoping to use xcpng as a hypervisor to setup different VMs / software setups, but have also run into roadblocks with pci passthrough.

I'm somewhat of a novice on low level issues like this but if there is any info i can provide to help with the support of these GPUs for passthrough, happy to do so.

Going to give proxmox a try, then bare metal but just wanted to add another somewhat different use case behind the Battlemage cards.

JamesG

@dkidd255 I'm a LOOONG time XCP/XenServer/XCP-ng user in my homelab...And it pains me to say this...

But this just works in Proxmox.

If you want to help us dig in and troubleshoot/explore this topic...Fine.

If you want to actually use your hardware and make progress on your ideas, go to Proxmox.

I seem to recall some recent firmware shenanigans from Intel. Intel maybe thought a little too much of their hardware, or they've decided to just scale things back a bit, but newer versions of firmware have reduced VF's available. I don't think the B70 is impacted by this, but it has massive memory in comparison to the smaller cards.

TeddyAstie

@dkidd255 @jamesg
I didn't forgot about it, but I still don't have access to relevant hardware (for reasons outside of my control).

In the meantime, if that happens to be related, can you try the patch that allows disabling hvm-pirq (this is going to be globally available soon) ?

pandusen

@JamesG Yeah, its scary that GPU passthrough still has a low priority for XCP-ng, during the boom of AI and local LLM Inferencing. I my self am starting to plan a move to Proxmox, though I do not really wish to move, cause I like XCP way better and have been with them for a long time... But that is just comfort...In the end, everything it comes down to is the capability and performance of the running VM guests.

dkidd255

@JamesG, Yea i ended up having to go with a bare metal ubuntu install + docker containers for everything and have been off to the races, I would still like a hypervisor but unfortunately had to move on.

The software stack on these intel's gpus is still maturing but i'm running some pretty impressive models on them and for the money it has been a good investment, hopefully these will gain some popularity and get better support all around.

GPU hosting definitely deserves some attention from xcpng. I would buy some licenses for some production use cases but things like this and nested virtualization (completely unrelated but also something i ran into this past week) needs attention.

stormi

@pandusen said:
its scary that GPU passthrough still has a low priority for XCP-ng, during the boom of AI and local LLM Inferencing.

As XCP-ng product owner, and someone who sees how much work developers put into such topics, may I ask you to elaborate on this "has low priority" statement?

pandusen

@stormi I dont doubt that the team works hard. The GPU passthrough support has been of lower priority for a long time, it has been said many times before by the team and Oliver. 99 percent of the dev team is working security and basic hypervisor, and is not prioritized for edge cases. Which i guess that PCI passthrough is for GPUs Please dont ask me to dig up the sources. It has always been the case with Xen.... Proxmox, KVM and vmware has the edge there, and that should be well known. But I would in any case where PCI passthrough for edge cases like the GPU marked kind of is, is not a requirement, Always recommend XCP-ng over the others.

stormi

@pandusen said:

99 percent of the dev team is working security and basic hypervisor

The numbers don't match any reality though. Yes, maintenance is important, but we have a developer working on AMD iGPU passthrough fixes, and Teddy here is following the Intel Arc topic closely and obtained hardware (waiting for it to be available in the lab). We also work on AMD MxGPU for vGPU support on the supported devices. We also have work on virtio-gpu. Without producing something that can become an actual feature yet, as it's complex, but there's clearly investment on those fronts.

stormi

@pandusen said:

But I would in any case where PCI passthrough for edge cases like the GPU marked kind of is, is not a requirement, Always recommend XCP-ng over the others.

Thanks for that :).

There's no problem to state faithfully what works and what doesn't with a solution, and adapt the advice to the actual needs.

I just felt compelled to react because I didn't find it entirely right to state that GPU passthrough has low priority. It's supported in general, but there are devices that come with technical challenges not fully addressed yet in Xen or in XCP-ng, and we treat that as part of the general hardware support we aim for.

Same as we work on device drivers for devices mostly found in home labs, without dismissing them as low priority.

And it's a good point to state that the needs around GPUs are growing fast due to AI, indeed.

yannsionneau

I get out of my silence to confirm that I'm indeed working on AMD MxGPU driver and AMD iGPU passthrough issues.
I confess that I have not communicated since a while on this work, but I'm making progress and I'm very close to publish a call to testing PoC packages that should improve the iGPU passthrough situation.

JamesG

@stormi My offer to give you guys VPN access to an Epyc server with Intel ARC B50 still stands.

IPSec, Wireguard, whatever...You can have IPMI access and at least some basic hardware to get you up and going.

JamesG

stormi

@JamesG Thanks. I'll let @teddyastie see. I think he would be more confortable with having the card in our lab, which should be imminent now, but I won't speak for him.