[vfio-users] NVIDIA GPU Passthrough to Win10 - Driver Disabled (Code 43)

[Alex Williamson]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 20:15:15 -0400
Steven Bell <stv.bell07 at gmail.com> wrote:

> So I tried a BIOS VM, freshly created from scratch. Reinstalled Windows 10
> and was able to get the NIC and USB passthrough working fine. When I
> removed the VNC Graphic device and Video Display, then add the NVIDIA card
> (graphics and audio) the machine doesn't boot and needs to be forced off.
> Even re-adding the VNC Graphic device and Video Display (so I can see what
> is going on) fixes it allowing it to boot (even though the GPU devices are
> still present). I can confirm when it boots normally that my TightVNC
> connection works. But I'm blind when just the NVIDIA devices are present so
> no clue WHY it's not booting.

You have IGD for host graphics which lies to the VGA arbiter about
disabling VGA regions, there's an article on my blog about this.  Long
story short, you either need to patch your kernel to makes i915 work
with VGA arbitration or you need to disable IGD and use a host graphics
card that works with VGA arbitration.  This is why OVMF is the
preferred solution since it doesn't make use of VGA regions but it's
not always easy to find 600 series GeForce cards with UEFI ROMs.  I was
able to get one for my EVGA GTX 660, but it didn't come with it
initially.  Thanks,

Alex