Two identical USB controllers, second VM never boots

[misterclay]

I bought a Startech 7-port USB PCIe cards with the Renesas chipset and everything works just fine when I pass it through to a VM.

 

I figured buying another one just like it would allow me to have another VM with USB hotplug capabilities, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.

 

I’m able to successfully start and boot into windows for the first VM. When I start the second, the USB card seems to disconnect, but memory never gets allocated and nothing seems to happen.

 

I thought something in the other VM might be causing it to hang like a conflicting device, but that was not the case. I double checked all devices and verified that both VMs boot and run perfectly without USB controllers passed-through.

 

Any idea why this would happen? If i can pass through two identical GPUs to two different VMs, why wouldn’t the USB controller cards work?

 

81:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720201 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1912:0014] (rev 03) (prog-if 30 [XHCI])
Subsystem: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720201 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1912:0014]
Physical Slot: 6
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 25, NUMA node 1
Memory at fb200000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: 
Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci

82:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720201 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1912:0014] (rev 03) (prog-if 30 [XHCI])
Subsystem: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720201 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1912:0014]
Physical Slot: 5
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 26, NUMA node 1
Memory at fb100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: 
Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci

I've already verified that my USB cards are in two different IOMMU groups, so I can't find a reason why it wouldn't work.

 

I'm not using Unraid, but I also remembered in this video that Linus also has issues with a particular VM not booting, and zooming into a previous video at about 13:15 I noticed that at least two of the USB cards they're using have the same chipset and device ID. (Renesas and 1912:0015, if you look closely)

Maybe this was the problem that @LinusTech was having?

 

Is it recommended that every USB card in the system be different?

 

My system specs are:

- xeon e5 2630 v4 (x2)

- 64GB micron ecc reg ddr4

- asus z10pe-d8 ws

[misterclay]

I've also just verified that if I have one of the Startech cards passed through to one VM, even the onboard intel xhci usb controlled has the same issue when I pass it through to the second VM (usb devices disconnect, system resources not allocated, QEMU/KVM hangs and only a reboot of the host would reset devices and make it ready to use again).

 

I'd really like feedback from anyone who's actually running more than one VM and has actually passed through different USB controllers to multiple VMs. As much as I appreciate the community help, guesses don't really do me much good here. I'd hate to return the second card and buy another just to find that it doesn't work either. 

[AbsoluteFool]

In what system are you trying to pass this through? Just saying not unraid is not really helpful. From what you are saying i can only guess that it's a hyervisor of some sort. But you're not saying if it's a type 1 or type 2 hypervisor.

[misterclay]

1 hour ago, AbsoluteFool said:

In what system are you trying to pass this through? Just saying not unraid is not really helpful. From what you are saying i can only guess that it's a hyervisor of some sort. But you're not saying if it's a type 1 or type 2 hypervisor.

My bad, I copied this post from another forum I posted in and missed the line that mentioned I'm just using QEMU/KVM on Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon. Also using Virt-Manager to edit the VMs.

[AbsoluteFool]

9 hours ago, misterclay said:

My bad, I copied this post from another forum I posted in and missed the line that mentioned I'm just using QEMU/KVM on Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon. Also using Virt-Manager to edit the VMs.

I see, i got way to little experience with KVM to answer your question. Sorry.