Up until November 18, 2020 I would have suggested against the purchase of an AMD GPU for VFIO. But yesterday AMD launched its Radeon RX 6800 line of GPUs. Are the AMD Radeon 6800/6800XT suitable for VFIO?
What is VFIO? -- Click to expandVFIO is about running for example Windows 10 in a virtual machine (VM), using a discrete graphics card that you pass through to the VM. The Linux driver framework that is used to bind the graphics card during the host boot is called VFIO. The virtual machine itself (e.g. Windows 10) then uses its own native graphics driver to drive the GPU, significantly boosting VM graphics performance. This enables you to run Linux on the host and create Windows virtual machines for gaming and other high performance tasks.
AMD graphics cards have been plagued with the notorious FLR reset bug over several years now. Independent developers wrote a kernel patch as a workaround that would work most of the time. But the patch required kernel or module compilation, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Yesterday Wendell at Level1Techs posted a (p)review of the latest AMD Radeon 6800 and 6800XT graphics cards. He attests that the AMD Radeon 6800/6800XT are perfectly suitable for VFIO passthrough. No more FLR reset bug. Wendell goes further to point out that the Linux graphics drivers available in Ubuntu 20.04 already support these cards. This is great news for the Linux user community in general, and VFIO passthrough enthusiasts especially! Finally an alternative to NVIDIA.
There are more good news: Those of you who already own an AMD Navi, Vega or Polaris graphics card plagued with the FLR reset bug can now enjoy a simpler, better workaround. Instead of compiling the patch into the kernel, all you need to do now is to “build the module and modprobe it, or use dmks to manage it directly”.
AMD has already shown its Linux support through its open source graphics drivers. The new graphics cards based on the RDNA2 architecture have finally corrected the product flaw of previous releases. Welcome to the VFIO club.
You will probably have to wait some time to get hold of one of these cards, as they seem to have sold out on launch day.
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