Support PCI Passthrough for OSX Hosts

[jimm]

PCI Passthrough is supported on VirtualBox for Linux hosts, it also works with VMWare Fusion for OSX. Would be nice to see working on OSX hosts.

[Socratis]

What PCI card were you thinking of passing through? If you were thinking about the GPU for gaming, do you have two GPUs on your Mac?

Plus I'm not sure that the Darwin kernel has all that it takes to have PCI passthrough enabled...

[Socratis]

I forgot to ask you this, but it's definitely worth its own comment...

I don't usually deal with other virtualization programs, but AFAIK, Fusion does NOT support PCI passthrough. If I'm not educated enough, as they often say in Wikipedia, then [Citation needed].

[jimm]

Not actually passing through anything, however need to have VFIO driver support to run ​https://github.com/spdk/spdk against the Virtual NVMe drive and this only happens when VT-d / IOMMU is supported in guest.

When passthrough works the /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/ folder contains subfolders and files. When it doesn't it is empty.

Can get this working in VirtualBox under Linux, can do it under VMWare Fusion OSX too, but OSX does not has this support.

[berkovskyy]

I am interested in this feature being implemented. I am using MacBook with a network card in a Thunderbolt enclosure. I prefer macOS For simple everyday tasks, such as browsing, but for anything non-trivial I prefer Linux guest environment inside VirtualBox. At the moment my storage is connected via 10GbE, because macOS have drivers for very limited number of cards. Being able to passthrough SAS, 10GbE and other cards in Thunderbolt enclosures would be great as it would allow to use most of PCIe cards with Linux guests directly.

Being able to passthrough GPU would be good as well, but I am not very interested in this scenario.

[Socratis]

Replying to berkovskyy:

MacBook with a network card in a Thunderbolt enclosure

That's not PCI passthrough, that's a completely different bus. And with the adoption rate, I wouldn't keep my hopes high.

[zengyulu]

Hi, is there any update on this ticket? I am verifying the pci passthrough on my macbook pro 2017 for thunderbolt 3 and virtualbox 6.0 doesn't work obviously.

[Socratis]

Replying to zengyulu:

Hi, is there any update on this ticket?

Yes, there is an update, just not in the direction that you might be thinking. With 6.1.0, even the PCI passthrough (which might have worked for Linux Hosts only) has been dropped. Not only you're not going to see Thunderbolt passthrough, but not even PCI.

From the latest 6.1.0RC1+ changelog:

• Linux host: Drop PCI passthrough, the current code is too incomplete (cannot handle PCIe devices at all), i.e. not useful enough

Replying to zengyulu:

I am verifying the pci passthrough on my macbook pro 2017 for thunderbolt 3 and virtualbox 6.0 doesn't work obviously.

I'm sorry, but ... are you verifying that something that was not supposed to exist, does not in fact exist?

Boy, do I have some news for you, regarding ​Bigfoot™ and the ​Loch Ness Monster™... :D

[zengyulu]

Replying to socratis:

Replying to zengyulu:

Hi, is there any update on this ticket?

Yes, there is an update, just not in the direction that you might be thinking. With 6.1.0, even the PCI passthrough (which might have worked for Linux Hosts only) has been dropped. Not only you're not going to see Thunderbolt passthrough, but not even PCI.

From the latest 6.1.0RC1+ changelog:

• Linux host: Drop PCI passthrough, the current code is too incomplete (cannot handle PCIe devices at all), i.e. not useful enough

PCI Passthrough is such important to VM. Hopefully in future version this feature can be picked again and made complete. Otherwise, I have to drop VirtualBox as well...

[Broly]

i too would like PCI passthrough, but i agree with socratis that it may not even be possible with how APPUL has treated the interface.

to be frank, i find the use cases and justifications here beyond comical.

my use-case was actually testing a PCI device (xonar audio card) in an older VM (10.8 seems to be where PCI works well in my case, Mac Pro 5,1), where running a VM would be really handy. then again, i would have also probably requested passthrough for the firewire800 port so i could debug blissfully.

i don't know if there's anything left in this ecosystem. noobs making demands for features they can't even appreciate, let alone use.

the state of PCI in the mac ecosystem is beyond comical and frankly, fitting.

i would have loved the ability to pass through an uninitialised device and work on it in the VM.

[aeichner]

There won't be any PCI passthrough support on macOS any time soon given that Apple is transitioning to Apple Silicon and removing support for third parties to create kernel extensions being required.