NitroPC Pro 2 GPU and BIOS question

NitroPad, NitroPC
1

Hi.

I’m trying to setup GPU passthrough on Qubes on the Nitro PC Pro 2. Qubes is using the NVIDIA card by default with nouveau, rather than the integrated Intel card. I’ve tried blacklisting the NVIDIA card or the nouveau driver in grub but I just end up with a black screen when I do that.

I’m also not sure how to access the BIOS settings to see if anything can be changed there, given that the PC boots directly into Heads (irrespective of whether I press F2, F11, Esc or Del).

If anyone could help either with switching over to the Intel card or accessing the BIOS settings that would be great!

2

On modern systems there is no BIOS anymore. There is just UEFI. Now heads is an open source and bare minimum implementation of UEFI. Just enough to boot and establish a root of trust. The rest is handled by the Linux system.

3

Hello if you want to set a GPU passthrough you need first to hide the PCI that your dGPU is using.

So you need to add this in the CMD GRUB line: rd.qubes.hide_pci=01:00.0

With the corresponding PCI value.

Then make sure that you still use the video port of your motherboard.

If you boot and see a black screen it’s possible that you did hide the wrong PCI port.

And also an you need to create this file in dom0 /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "Intel"
Option "DRI" "3"
EndSection

4

Thanks for the replies!

@alexandre I did what you suggested and what happens now is that the startup process stops at:
[FAILED] Failed to start lightdm.service - Light Display Manager

I definitely hid the PCI port of the NVIDIA card, not the Intel one. Any thoughts on what to try next?

EDIT: I should maybe also mention that with qvm-pci, the Intel card is listed as a Display Controller, whereas the NVIDIA one is VGA Controller. Not sure to what extent that’s relevant.

5

If you disconnect the GPU card can you boot into your Qubes system ?

6

Yes. I disconnected the NVIDIA card. I then changed grub back to its original form and removed the 20-intel.conf file otherwise it didn’t seem to work (it may have been just due to the grub change though).

Now it boots fine and lists the intel card as “VGA compatible controller.” sys-net no longer works though, since it seems to no longer find the network card by its PCI, but I’m assuming that’s just because things got reassigned when I removed the GPU?

7

I managed to get it to work! The problem was with the xorg conf file. The PCI id listed in qvm-pci (or lspci) for my Intel card was 00:02.0. I didn’t realize that when typing into the BusID field in the xorg file it should take the decimal form 0:2:0. The other thing I did was change the driver field to “modesetting” so that it used the i915 driver. Now, everything seems to be working. Thanks for the help @alexandre!

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8

No problem btw we have a guide on how to use GPU passtrough with QubesOS:

https://docs.nitrokey.com/nitropc/qubes/gpu-install

Note that it’s possible depending your CPU that windows virtualization is not working.
If you are experiencing BSOD while installing windows then it’s likely that your CPU have some compatibility issue.

9

Thanks! I managed to get it to work with a Debian qube. :grin:

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