I have a T430 with a full-size H330 raid controller. It boots to a Linux distribution installed on a disk connected to one of the internal SATA ports. My goal is to connect the H330 directly to a KVM virtual machine via VT-d (IOMMU) passthrough.
I'm discovered that the H330 has a reserved memory range published in the BIOS RMRR table. I woul guess that this reserved memory range is used for management through iDRAC. Unfortunately, because of this reservation, Linux refuses to mapping the H330 into the virtual machine via the IOMMU.
I'm comfortable with losing the ability to manage the H330 through iDRAC, since I'm only going to be using the controller as an HBA within the target VM.
So far, I've tried
- Cross flash the card to LSI firmware
The H330 is based on the LSI 3008 controller. Like the H310 (LSI 2008), it may be possible to cross-flash the H330 to LSI firmware for another 3008-based card. However, I have not been successful at erasing the card's flash, thus LSI's flash tool will not recognize the card as supported.
- Disable management of the card in iDRAC
There doesn't seem to be a way to configure this in iDRAC / racadm.
- Disable the Option ROM of the card.
In theory, this would prevent the card from creating any pre-boot registrations in the BIOS, and this shouldn't cause any loss of functionality in the OS since I'm not booting to any drives on the controller. Unfortunately, the Dell BIOS detects the card and forcibly re-enables loading of the Option ROM.
Is IOMMU passthrough of this card supported by Dell? If not, has anyone had any (unsupported) success with the H330 in a similar configuration?