A more than capable homelab system is pretty affordable now a days. You can essentially get a functioning homelab datacenter, lol 😄 for less than $350 US.

Potential mini pc options:

• Intel NUC
• minisforum
• beelink,

This short post is about adding flexibility to MinisForum mini pcs with AMD CPUs as Proxmox hosts. Personally I’m using the Minisforum HX90 with the 5800HX Ryzen 9 processor.

Please note, these settings are not required to make Proxmox work, however they’ll bring functionality to the Virtio virgl GPU devices.

I spent significant time doing GoogleFu for this configuration, hopefully this will save you from that headache.

IOMMU settings

IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit) groups are a concept in computer hardware and virtualization that categorize and isolate devices, such as GPUs and USB controllers, into separate groups for better control and security. These groups enable fine-grained control over device access and can be crucial for tasks like GPU passthrough in virtualization environments.

The MinisForum mini pc’s come with undesirable IOMMU group setup, with multiple devices, (GPU,USB, SATA) in the same group.

Luckily the Linux’s Kernel has capabilities to regroup them.

This is done by updating kernel command line parameters. Depending on the chosen bootloader you’ll need to add: pcie_acs_override=downstream,multifunction to the config.

In grub this is done by adding to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" variable inside of the /etc/default/grub file.

It should look something like this `GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=“pcie_acs_override=downstream,multifunction”

There are things to consider before using these settings be sure to read the documentation to make an informed decision if this is the right choice for you

==DOCS:==

• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/virtualization_deployment_and_administration_guide/sect-iommu-deep-dive
• https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough
• Alex Williams’ ACS Override Patch

Virgl - display adapter

Virgl is an emulated GPU that allows the Virtual Machines to utilize the GPU on the host machine. (Only works in Linux Virtual Machines currently). The benefit of this is multiple virtual machines can utilize the GPU.

A full GPU pass through would lock the GPU to one virtual machine.

This is a nice tool, to have in the tool belt for certain use cases.

Happy labbing

Hope this helps you unlock the Minisforum mini pcs! I’d love to connect and talk homelab. See the footer for contact info

#LabEveryDay