Re: GPU Passthrough on FreeBSD 14.3 (AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT and Windows 10 Pro)

Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well. Since the last time I sent a message, I've been able to collect a bit more data. After I sent that message, my VM actually started having issues with it turning off, it took many reboots for it to get stabilized again. There were different error codes, usually related to 0x77 and 0x78, which seem to be related to power management or potentially cpu related. I eventually decided to try to see if I could turn the VM on, and immediately open up a game (like cyberpunk 2077) and just leave it running in the main menu. Essentially I was trying to force the VM to always stay running so that any power management optimizations that bhyve is doing don't run or are reduced. Leaving Cyberpunk 2077 running for 3 days had no issues. I then decided to close the game and just leave it running on idle to see if it crashed, it still hasn't crashed in another 2 days. So I have 5 days of uptime so far, and I've played a few sessions for at least 1-2 hours each session. Every once in a while there would be massive lag spike and I see my CPU (and I think GPU) cores going a bit crazy, after a little bit things calm down a bit. I wonder if that would have been a situation where the VM would have crashed, but didn't due to the game being running. I have no idea.

I've also was able to finally get Windows 11 Pro installed in bhyve and I was able to bypass all of the install and online requirements.

I was reading jbo and other people's success at this thread: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/bhyve-vm-stuck-when-passthru-enabled.92854/page-2#post-719569

so that inspired me to try and work through the issues I was receiving before (I wanted to find a way to bypass everything using a clean Microsoft ISO and now have to use Rufus to modify the install.. plus Rufus doesn't seem to generate an ISO, and I'm trying to install this in bhyve). I documented all we need here: https://xyinn.org/blog/freebsd/install_windows_11_bhyve

Now that it's documented and I have a VM running, I'm going to upgrade my server from FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE to the stable branch so I can take advantage of this new commit that seems to have fixed the vCPU issues/crashes on Windows 11.. that issue seems to be very similar to what I've been experiencing on Windows 10 so I feel there may be a relationship there. Once I upgrade and have that fix running, I'm gonna do more experiments in my Windows 10 VM and see how stable it runs. I also will try out GPU passthrough on Windows 11 as well and I'll probably make a smaller length video showing the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT on Windows 11 Pro as well, and of course, test the patch's stability since my Windows 11 Pro VM already crashed a few times when I use it with 2 cores (and no passthrough). When I use it with 1 core it hasn't crashed so far.

- Jonathan