Can we vGPU on an HP Microserver G10 Plus v2 with ProxMox

[fab4fifty]

@Patrick this is for you, I believe you are in a unique position to help, I saw on your videos that you have the same love hate relationship with these devices.

Some of you might know me from writing on of the most read posts regarding the migration from vmWare to Proxmox on Reddit with almost half a million views, my scripts to deploy SSL with let's encrypt on Windows Servers or my disk formatting guide and scripts with thousands of readers and users every year.

As many of you I grew up with the 8th Gen of the HP Microserver and I always saw it as an average server with a good IPMI solution and some painful limitations (16 GB Ram) in a well engineered form factor. HP's compromises on this platform have always been painful, but the physical usability of the case made up for it in many aspects. It's like the Volkswagen of Homeservers, a little luxury, good build quality and some compromises for a sticker price that was only permissible because you hoped it would run for ages. As many of you I use decommissioned hardware at home, which means for many of us G8-10 HP or Gen 12 to 14 Dell Systems, with all the drawbacks and benefits.

So in recent years two major things happened in IT:

• AI;
• Intel released vGPU capable cards that don't require fortunes for drivers or copyright infringements.

As some of you might know, vGPU is far from an easy implementation on system level requiring a lot of tinkering and funny enough, requires some features that seem hard to come by on HP and Dell servers:

1. Above 4G Decoding allowing O/S to map memory on PCIe devices efficiently;
2. Resizable Bar allowing the system to access the GPUs entire VRAM in one piece or as many as you desire.

Both features are crucial if you want to do anything but pass a GPU directly to a VM hence fractioning a GPU into two or more virtual GPUs (or "vGPU"). Both are, extensively part of the UEFI standard, even if you might not see the features, because the manufacturer hides them, odds are, they are there. Dell and HP servers are special beasts though, the UEFI is not made by a 3rd party, but by Dell and HP themselves giving them larger leeway to suppress or enable features, that other manufacturers just hide.

So here is my plan to get vGPU on Microservers running:

1) buy one;
2) tinker with the UEFI;
3) install proxmox;
4) make vGPU work with it;
5) document the absolute s**** out of it and post it here and on Reddit.

But I need your help first:
To safe me from the pain of wasting 1200 EUR on hardware, I need to know one thing:
does the UEFI of Proliant 10th gen servers support 4G Decoding. Unfortunately HP encrypts the update BINs so it's not possible to figure this out without having a physical machine.

What will you need to help me out on this:

Before throwing myself into this it would be nice if somebody could check out the following two things:

Test 1: Hidden UEFI MENU
Enter the UEFI and strike CTRL + A to verify if 4G support and REBAR support are present on any Microserver Gen 10 Plus V2.

Test 2: Check if a hidden setting is present

Requirements:

1. An HP Microserver Gen 10 Plus v2;
2. Windows installed on it barebone; it should also work with Linux, but in this specific field I have less experience.

Process:

In Short: read out the BIOS and tell me if the configuration options to make vGPU on this system possible are only hidden or non existing.

1. Download UEFITool (NE version is fine), IRFExtractor-RS and grub-mod-setup_var.
2. Extract IRFExtractor-RS and leave the folder for now, we will come back to it later.
3. Open your BIOS in UEFITool and search for 4G Decod (NOT Decode) with Unicode enabled. If it doesn't find anything, try searching for Above 4G or MMIO. It can also be called 64-Bit Resource Allocation or similar. Some platforms require you enable Above 4GB MMIO assignment too.
4. Extract body of the section that search finds. Save this .bin to our IRFExtractor-RS folder.
5. Open terminal and locate the IRFExtractor-RS folder. Now run IRFExtractor-RS provided with our 4GDecodBody.bin that we extracted earlier. This should produce a .txt file.
6. Open the .txt and search 4G Decod or Above 4G in it. The value after VarStoreInfo (VarOffset/VarName): on the 4G Decoding entry is the offset which stores the setting. You may find multiple entries with the same VarOffset.

It's fully documented here: Enabling hidden 4G decoding

So who is nice enough to give this a try?

 

[Patriot]

I am not sure the UEFI extractor will work, and my nas is in production so, no windows...but I did reboot it for you.

 

[fab4fifty]

I found that as well in the mean time and it does not seem to yield the same result. GPUz gives me 64 bit PCIe space enabled but resizable bar disabled

 

[fab4fifty]

Though the naming HP gives is admittedly hilarious, I could confirm that the setting on gen 10 blades enables resizable bar, I was not able to confirm the same on micro servers.

 

[Patriot]

I found that as well in the mean time and it does not seem to yield the same result. GPUz gives me 64 bit PCIe space enabled but resizable bar disabled

Yes, 64bit means it could support large bar.... if it was allowed and enabled.
And in servers it is usually called >4g decoding.
If you do manage to extract and modify the bios... it should fail the root of trust from ILO...but ilo is an add-on and not as integrated in this system. IDK...