PCIe device passthrough on bare-metal EC2 instances

Question

Hi

I am trying to run some experiments which require passing one or more of the local NVMe SSDs on a bare-metal EC2 instance into a VM. I am running Linux as the host OS and would normally leverage kvm and vfio-pci to get this done. On my EC2 instance however I see no IOMMU groups or vfio kernel module. I have heard that PCIe passthrough is possible on EC2 bare-metal. Can I get some details on how to do that? I would prefer to use Ubuntu 22.04 as my bare-metal OS but if I need to use something else Linux based I can.

Thanks

Stephen

Answer

As an update I have tried adding intel_iommu=on to my GRUB and rebooting. That causes my instance to hang! So I suspect some very nasty interaction between the AWS Nitro system and the Intel IOMMU is occuring?

Answer

I have the same experience and no specific answer from AWS yet, please update if you were able to get an answer to that.

PCIe device passthrough on bare-metal EC2 instances

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