How display Windows bootscreen on passthrough GPU in ESXi?

[jzef]

Hi. I use ESXi 6.7.0 Update 3 (Build 17167734) . I passthrough the PCIe AMD HD7450 card without a problem, but how to make bootscreen display on the monitor connected to this card?

I tried to disable SVGA card in the .VMX file but then the machine does not start:

svga.present = "FALSE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

 

[zachj]

On an amd gpu you don’t need the second line in your vmx file

I’m not aware of any way to display VM boot screen on the physical monitor…I’ve always just set svga.present = “true” when I need to troubleshoot.

what guest OS are you using? Something tells me it’s macOS ;-). If I’m right then the reason your vm wont boot when you disable svga is because you need to add a line in the vmx to pass the vbios for your gpu to your vm; amd graphics cards for some reason lose their vbios during pass through so you have to explicitly provide it.

 

[jzef]

@zachj
I succeeded but not in ESXi only on Virt Manager (QEMU) on the Debian 9 XFCE 64-bit host. UEFI virtual machine (Win7 or Win10): OVMF-Code.fd, i440FX chipset, passthrough AMD HD7450 + AMD Audio and Video VMVGA in settings
With other virtual graphics cards: QXL, VGA, Cirrus - only post and UEFI settings appear on both - VM Console and on monitor connected to AMD HD7450 but Windows bootscreen is only in VM Console window.

It only works with the VMVGA card (VMWare) - then the POST, UEFI settings and Windows bootscreen are only on the monitor connected to the AMD HD7450 card.