ESXI 6(.5) - OSX with GPU Passthrough

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esxifan

New Member
May 28, 2017
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I share the same bad experience with NVidia Quadro and Sierra.
If anyone has some suggestion it would be welcome.
Already tried the pciHole trick and the v0 one.

Hi, I did it with a Quadro K2200, with the Nvidia Web Drivers installed (and snapshop) BEFORE adding the card.

It comes up in Nvidia Driver Manager, as well as, in Apple Devices.

But, 'About this Mac' show 'Display 128mb' (the vmware driver) and it's also listed along with the K2200, in Apple Devices.

When I select LaunchPad/Other, that Other screen draws from top to bottom, very, very slowly. But I do notice that the login screen shows the Desktop image as a blurred background, instead of no image at all.
I thought that was a sign of the video kicking in. Maybe that also happens with the VMWARE Tools Darwin.iso.

When I attach this same card to a Windows Machine, I see only the Quadro card in Device Manager and not VMWARE sVGA. And it's working with Hardware accelleration (Dxdiag reports all DirectX features enabled

How can I try and fix this?

Shuttle SZ170R8V2
ESXi 6.5
Sierra 12.5
Quadro K2200
 

Paul Devine

New Member
Jan 6, 2017
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I share the same bad experience with NVidia Quadro and Sierra.
If anyone has some suggestion it would be welcome.
Already tried the pciHole trick and the v0 one.
I tried with a GTX 950 and a Radion RX460. I got both of them working with a Windows 10 guest, then tried to get them working with a Mac guest. I used windows first to validate the PCI pass through and the basic config. I couldn't figure the macOS out. The Mac guest would list the hardware in the System Report, and show the GTX card in the nvidia web driver control panel. But the display control panel never recognized it. I tired altering the various kext files, never had any positive results.
 

Sidhoah

New Member
Jun 4, 2017
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For what it's worth, I spent a while trying to get passthrough working with MacOS. Regarding Sierra, RyC seems to be correct:
FWIW, there was a change from El Capitan to Sierra that's preventing both AMD and nvidia GPUs from passing through OOB for me. They do passthrough, but are not recognized in System Profiler OOB like they were in El Capitan.
On ESX 6.0 and Sierra, I tried with a Radeon 5770 and a RX460. Both are seen when you go to System Report>Graphics/Displays. But don't show the monitor attached and don't show in Displays.
In El Capitan, the 5770 works OOB with no hacks needed. The RX460 only has support from Sierra onwards so is a no go with El Capitan.

If anyone has an idea why Sierra doesn't support Passthrough, would be great to hear!
 

fishtacos

New Member
Jun 8, 2017
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In ESXi 6.5 Update 1 OSX GPU passthrough worked for me, although it did not work with previous builds (VM would boot loop). I'm running a Quadro 2000 with the latest NVIDIA web driver for OSX (Sierra). It is certainly worthwhile to try passthrough again in this last build.

Running 3d benchmarks and the Maps application work (which did not before) but I can't tell if it's working fully with UI quarz acceleration since I don't have a monitor hooked up to the GPU, only remote access.
I also ran across a utility that showed realtime GPU usage on the Mac. So far so good.
 

roswellian

Member
Oct 18, 2013
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For what it's worth, I spent a while trying to get passthrough working with MacOS. Regarding Sierra, RyC seems to be correct:

On ESX 6.0 and Sierra, I tried with a Radeon 5770 and a RX460. Both are seen when you go to System Report>Graphics/Displays. But don't show the monitor attached and don't show in Displays.
In El Capitan, the 5770 works OOB with no hacks needed. The RX460 only has support from Sierra onwards so is a no go with El Capitan.

If anyone has an idea why Sierra doesn't support Passthrough, would be great to hear!
Same here! I believe passthrough actually works as expected, but the Sierra just cannot find the proper drivers like El Captian. The only way to make it work is to use Clover. However the latest version of Clover is broken for ESXi, and dev team just not gonna fix it....
 

Sidhoah

New Member
Jun 4, 2017
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In ESXi 6.5 Update 1 OSX GPU passthrough worked for me, although it did not work with previous builds (VM would boot loop). I'm running a Quadro 2000 with the latest NVIDIA web driver for OSX (Sierra). It is certainly worthwhile to try passthrough again in this last build.
Cool. Thanks for the info... will give it a try!
 

calvinz360

New Member
Jul 12, 2017
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I tried to boot a fresh VM installation with Sierra but went into a kernel panic boot loop, since I'm already on 6.5U1 it should've been supporting OSX guest out of the box already correct ?