AMD Radeon RX 9070 GPU Passthrough not working

[Rad25]

GPU not detected in Windows 11 VM and i can't install AMD Drivers.

 

 

Linux Mint 22.1 (Host - Intel iGPU), Windows 11 (Guest - RX 9070).

[Windows7ge]

Is IOMMU/VT-d enabled in the BIOS and in GRUB on the host and did you pass both 3:00.0 & 3:00.1 together? What CPU/Motherboard are you using?

 

This process can be a little tricky but you seem to have the bulk of it figured out.

 

I assume you made it to the Windows 11 desktop? Does Device Manager report more than one Microsoft Basic Display Adapter? Did you disable the SPICE display? Do you get any output out of the GPU with or without the guest driver?

 

[Rad25]

The same in Ubuntu 25.04 Daily Build. This GPU not supported yet for GPU Passthrough or?

[Rad25]

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Is IOMMU/VT-d enabled in the BIOS and in GRUB on the host and did you pass both 3:00.0 & 3:00.1 together? What CPU/Motherboard are you using?

 

This process can be a little tricky but you seem to have the bulk of it figured out.

 

I assume you made it to the Windows 11 desktop? Does Device Manager report more than one Microsoft Basic Display Adapter? Did you disable the SPICE display? Do you get any output out of the GPU with or without the guest driver?

 

 

I have VT-d enabled in BIOS. I pass both. I have i5-13600K and ASRock Z790 PG Sonic.

[Rad25]

I got this screen when i install AMD Drivers (GPU Passthrough and Single GPU Passthrough):

 

Not my picture.

 

[Ralphred]

Post your modprobe.conf (or whatever it's called) and kernel cmdline please.

[Windows7ge]

3 hours ago, Rad25 said:

This GPU not supported yet for GPU Passthrough or?

I don't know. I haven't kept up with the bleeding edge of hardware and it's compatability with VFIO.

 

Do you have a different older card on hand we could test with? Try swapping them out and see if you get a picture. If you do then yes it may be a compatibility issue.

[Nayr438]

12 hours ago, Rad25 said:

I got this screen when i install AMD Drivers (GPU Passthrough and Single GPU Passthrough):

This one may be related to the re-occuring GPU Reset Issues AMD has had. I can not however confirm that.
This is for the 7000 Series but it may be relevant here, https://forum.level1techs.com/t/the-state-of-amd-rx-7000-series-vfio-passthrough-april-2024/210242

[Rad25]

I got this screen on picture (DisplayPort - RX 9070 (Windows 11 Guest), HDMI - Intel iGPU (Ubuntu Host)).

 

I'm using Ubuntu 25.04 Daily Build, i5-13600K and ASRock Z790 PG Sonic.

 

[BoomerDutch]

Check if you have eufi enabled on both.

 

I've had this issue before with proxmox and I've realised proxmox is in boot mode not uefi mode so I've fixed it then it worked gpu passthrough although I'm using nvidia so yeah.

[Rad25]

GPU detected and latest AMD Drivers installed but the same screen on DisplayPort.

 

https://pureinfotech.com/disable-automatic-driver-install-windows-11/

[Rad25]

I got Error 173 when installing AMD Drivers in Fedora 41 (No GPU detected). GPU also not detected in VM.

 

[Kilrah]

Threads merged, please don't repost threads.

 

Might need to install/build a newer kernel.

Never a good idea to get the latest hardware for linux use, give it 6-12 months depending on distro for the kinks to be ironed out. 

[Nayr438]

Fedora is still on mesa 24 and you need mesa 25 as stated here 

 

The only distro im aware of that is on Mesa 25 currently is Arch.

 

Ubuntu will with 25.10 LTS towards the end of April.

Fedora 42 still shows mesa 24.

 

 

If your VM can't see your GPU then you haven't passed it through. You need to provide more Information about your KVM/libvirt setup and verify vfio is attached to your GPU. As for your previous attempts have you even looked at the GPU reset issue I previously linked to to see if it can resolve your issue?

[Rad25]

Everything works in EndeavourOS but i got that screen on DisplayPort (Windows 11 Guest).

 

[Mojo_JojoSK]

On 3/21/2025 at 3:45 AM, Rad25 said:

Everything works in EndeavourOS but i got that screen on DisplayPort (Windows 11 Guest).

 

I figured it out for my set up. I'm not in front of my PC now. I will try to share my configs, Grub settings, driver rebinding steps and so on in the next few days. 

 

I had this exact same issue with my 9070 XT. Everything worked fine using an actual attached monitor (no dummy plug, spice or RDP). As long as I stayed on the "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter" driver. The moment I installed the AMD Adrenalin driver in the Windows guest it did exactly this weird test screen looking thing.

 

The secret sauce was in the OP forum post linked by @Nayr438. According to the post, AMD drivers see that it is a virtual machine, and disables physical displays and adds virtual displays. That's why it is necessary to "hide" that it is a VM at all.

You could probably get away ignoring most of it since it seems like the reset bug is not happening for me (yet). I even left ROM BAR ticked and have Resizable Bar enabled. But, the parts you want to add (only add, leave the existing ones as is for now) to your XML is in the "features" section. As well as the QEMU Args at the bottom of the linked post regarding Resizable BAR if you have that activated on your motherboard. 

 

<hyperv>
  <vendor_id state="on" value="0123456789ab"/>
</hyperv>
<kvm>
  <hidden state="on"/>
</kvm>

On 3/15/2025 at 1:21 PM, Nayr438 said:

This one may be related to the re-occuring GPU Reset Issues AMD has had. I can not however confirm that.

This is for the 7000 Series but it may be relevant here, https://forum.level1techs.com/t/the-state-of-amd-rx-7000-series-vfio-passthrough-april-2024/210242

 

[Rad25]

Thanks. It's working now.

 

I add:

 

<hyperv>
  <vendor_id state="on" value="0123456789ab"/>
</hyperv>
<kvm>
  <hidden state="on"/>
</kvm>

[Rad25]

It's working in EndeavourOS too.

 

https://dividebyzer0.gitlab.io/GPUpassthrough.html

 

Is it possible to use GPU Passthrough in Linux (Guest) - Linux (Host)?

[Ralphred]

On 3/27/2025 at 3:41 AM, Rad25 said:

Is it possible to use GPU Passthrough in Linux (Guest) - Linux (Host)?

Aye, the VM has "direct access" to the passed-through hardware, so as long as it has drivers for said hardware available it'll work, just make sure any other VM that uses the hardware is properly shut down first.

If the differing OS's try to load different GPU firmware on driver instantiation this can cause issues, but you can normalise this.

 

For performance purposes (read: gaming) it's better to pass an entire drive to a Windows VM, not just a qcow image.

An xml "whole drive" snippet:

<disk type="block" device="disk">
  <driver name="qemu" type="raw" cache="none" io="native" discard="unmap"/>
  <source dev="/dev/sda"/>
  <target dev="sda" bus="sata"/>
  <boot order="1"/>
  <address type="drive" controller="0" bus="0" target="0" unit="0"/>
</disk>

it might work with <source dev="/dev/sda1"/> to pass a partition as a whole drive, but I've never tried it as a boot device so...

 

It's also worth noting you can share the same install drive (qcow or physical) and have a "non-passthrough instance" of your VM, so if you just want to access some windows only software but don't need the performance of a native GPU you can run it up using spice and save the time/chores of the detachment/attachment process.