TestBot and graphics tests

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 9:52 AM Francois Gouget <fgouget at codeweavers.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 25 Apr 2019, Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
> [...]
> > From memory this Asrock board likely works okay. Back in the days we
> > were a very early adopter of Vt-d/iommu working closely with Intel /
> > Nvidia.
>
> It turns out it's the processor that does not support VT-d. So Asrock is
> off the hook.
>
>
> [...]
> > For an AMD card, the main hassles are that some of them have "PCIe
> > reset" issues, which may prevent a VM from booting the card. AMD is
> > not like Nvidia trying to block virtualization on consumer cards.
> > Their Radeon Pro cards can sometimes be a little better. A cheap
> > Radeon Pro WX2100 is for example a fine card.
>
> I found The Passthrough Post website which has a list of compatible
> hardware. I think I'll do some tests here with a Gigabyte RX 550 D5 and
> then we can pick something from that range.
>
> https://passthroughpo.st/vfio-increments/
>
> On the Nvidia side I don't know if picking a Quadro instead of a
> consumer graphics card would have an impact on the Wine tests.
>
> Otherwise it seems the code 43 error and MSI interrupt issues are
> reasonably well understood and can reliably be worked around these days.
>

They continue to tighten the checks in the drivers. You need to
disable high performance timers and other desirable features (though
we don't care that much about performance). It is just very likely to
break quickly and an uphill battle.

The Quadros should be similar enough. It is mostly presets for
enterprise apps and here and there improved hardware e.g. some have
ECC or more fp64. (ECC could be nice as Geforce cards are not meant
for 24/7 operation, Quadros can handle it better. We found out the
hard way..)

If you are also looking at upgrading the system itself. I would
suggest these days to take a nice AMD Threadripper system as it has
plenty of PCIe. Put in multiple GPUs and you have multiple test boxes
e.g. 4 in one. AMD's iommu works well too.

Thanks,
Roderick