[vfio-users] VFIO device assignment fails for LSI SAS2008 on Xeon E3-1200 v3

[Damon Namod]

Hi Okky,

thanks for you response!

Passing the card to a Linux (Ubuntu 15.04) guest fails with the same message:

	qemu-system-x86_64: vfio_dma_map(0x5613dc154610, 0xfeb90000, 0x2000, 0x7f7976a09000) = -14 (Bad address)
	qemu: hardware error: vfio: DMA mapping failed, unable to continue

The M1015 is already flashed to IT mode and I have disable bios boot support to circumvent the issue you described. I already switched the PCIe slot but the symptoms are the same. Actually it's an interesting thought that it might have something to do with the controller itself. Any more thoughts on this? Could be the Xeon E3-1200 and the laking ACS support be an issue (I don't think so though)? Could be a different machine type than `pc` help?

I also tried the latest GIT version of `qemu-system-x86_64` but the error message remains the same. Is there any way to get some more details about the error? `dmesg` isn't much of a help as it doesn't contain any messages regarding my problem. The only error message I got is found inside `/var/log/libvirt/qemu/`...

Thanks and best regards,
Damon

> On 08 May 2016, at 21:14, Okky Hendriansyah <okky.htf at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 5:51 AM, Damon Namod <msg at damon.at> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm trying to pass a LSI SAS2008 controller to a guest using VFIO. First of all, some details on my system:
> 
>     # lsb_release -d
>     Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS
> 
>     # uname -rs
>     Linux 4.4.0-22-generic
> 
>     # cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -m 1 "model name"
>     model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1225 v3 @ 3.20GHz
> 
>     # qemu-system-x86_64 --version
>     QEMU emulator version 2.0.0 (Debian 2.0.0+dfsg-2ubuntu1.22), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
> 
>     # libvirtd --version
>     libvirtd (libvirt) 1.2.2
> 
> I'm using libvirt/virsh to pass the device to a (freenas) guest and at first it looks like the domain would start just fine because virsh reports "Domain freeness started". The domain, however, crashes right after start with the following message from `/var/log/libvirt/qemu/freenas.log`. The full log is attached:
> 
>         ...
> 
> Previously, I used to pass the controller using KVM pci assignment but due to it's deprecation in Linux 4.2 I wanted to switch to VFIO. Generally, it seems to work on my system but not for the device in question.
> 
> I'd appreciate any help.
> 
> Best,
> Damon
> 
> Hi Damon,
> 
> Can you passthrough the card to Linux guests? If I recall correctly, I never had success passing through my IBM ServeRAID M1015 card to FreeBSD-based guest (PC-BSD at the time). The guest just crash immediately. I think the issue lies on the FreeBSD, since I could pass it to Debian guest successfully (but I need to pass the ROM file to the command line since the card's BIOS was initialized early at host boot). Reflashing the card to pure IT-mode without BIOS should make it unnecessary to pass the ROM file, though I never tried it since at the end I put the ZFS on the host hypervisor. 
> 
> Best regards,
> Okky Hendriansyah
>