GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

[SeaneyC]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

FYI:
With the newest F5b Bios, my IOMMU is now working perfectly fine!
I can enable it and everything boots up fine.

Can you post link to 5B? I can only find 4B and 5 and 6.

Thanks, Sean

[LogicWater]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Gigabyte's BIOS downloads for GA-890FXA-UD5 -> <click here>

[chbarg]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Hello everybody

I am having a hard time making IOMMU work on a 890FXA-UD5 rev 2.1, Phenom II 710, 8 GB RAM with Centos 64bit 5.5 Linux.

With bios F5 (as shipped) Linux installed but did not passed any NIC (on board or at PCIe slot) to the guest (another Centos 5.5).

Bios F6 created a "kernel panic" at the beginning of the boot sequence. Adding kernel parameter iommu=nopanic solved that but I still can not make it work.
BTW, if I disable IOMMU from the bios, the kernel panic dissapears.

Questions:

What revision of Bios would you recommend that is proven to work?
What distro/version of Linux are you using?
Is there any other tweak in the bios/kernel parameters that help?

Thank you very much for your help !

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Did you try any of the beta's previously linked in this thread? If not please do as it seemed those were working ok as reported by many users.

[artdrivers]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

You may want to try ↓bios F4A↓ It will take about 40 seconds for the regular download button to appear. It will be a .rar
MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Thanks Artdrivers, hopefully that works for him as I know a while back when we were originally talking with Gigabyte about this it was working just fine.

[chbarg]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Thank you all for your quick response. I apologize that I haven't tested your suggestions yet. I will try them as soon as I can. I have tried both versions of BIOS F5 and F6. Throughout this thread I read that only a beta BIOS completely enabled the IOMMU functionality. Is it fair to say that most people have succeeded to use IOMMU under Ubuntu? Thank you for your help !!!

[artdrivers]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Even Ubutu server takes a little extra line. I stummbled on ↓this↓. I hope it helps.

[charlie0440]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Can anyone confirm they have successfully used IOMMU on a GA-890FXA-UD7 rev 2.1 including passing through a PCI device?

Is IOMMU enabled in the latest BIOS F5b?

I want to buy this board but without knowing for sure I'm not willing to spend the money!

[chbarg]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Hello, I am reporting back after a while.

In the end I gave up with Linux virtualization and I tested the MB with ESXi 4.1U1.

Passthrough seems to work fine for the SATA controller (6 ports) ESATA (2 ports), and GSATA (Gigabyte controller 2 ports internal).

The NICS do not work. For some reason, the NICs are detected correctly by the VM but the can not pass any traffic, therefore they are not able to communicate with the network. This issue is independent of the OS used in the VM.
I was not able to fix it, even with the help of Gigabyte support.
The issue repeats in another MB with a different AMD Phenom II.

QUESTION: What devices are you typically passing through?
I bought the MB to be able to pass the SATA controller and a NIC to a VM so as to get almost native speed for the file server. In the end I had to buy another Intel NIC

Thank you

[RoboJ1M]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Hi,

I'm still working on Linux KVM VT with Ubuntu Server 10.10 (although I'm waiting for 11.04 to see if anything has been fixed)

I'm passing a WinTV NOVA-T 500 dual DVB-T PCI card for vitual mythtv.

After a lot of ****ing about I successfully passed it through to a VM and tuned in a TV channel. It required a kernel recompile and the ubuntu-server-edgers ppa for the latest kvm/qemu stuff. Further to that you have to manually un-hook the PCI card from the host OS and that's where the problem lies.

Sadly you cannot yet do the above and have a stable machine. Shutting down any guest with the PCI passed through caused the host OS to panic and die. It's a limitation of passing though devices on the wrong side of a PCI-PCI bridge.

I'm saving for a PCI-E tuner so there is no bridge in the way.

Gory Details:
KVM Development List

RoboJ1M

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libvirt/+bug/639712

Regards,

J1M.

[RoboJ1M]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Hello Everybody,

SUCCESS!!!!

Using the following hardware:

Gigabyte GA-890FX-UD5
Hauppauge HVR-2200 PCI-e DVB-T TV tuner

And the following software:

Ubuntu Server 11.04 x64 - host
Mythbuntu 11.04 x86 - guest
virt-manager 0.8.6

I passed the card through to the guest using the virt-manager GUI and it all "Just Works" tm (my favorite kind of Works)

All it took was a new motherboard, RAM, TV tuner and 2 releases of the OS.

Now I have Virtual Myth TV!! Soon to be followed by virtual network router/VPN concentrator and virtual file server and some sort of automated backup procedure. w00t!

Regards,

J1M.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-890FXA-UD5 IOMMU BIOS Switch?

Nice to hear everything is working as expected, thanks for posting about your success with this for others!