Does A40 work in displayless mode for GPU passthrough? Or does it only work with vGPU?

Gaming and Visualization Technologies General Topics and Other SDKs GPU - Hardware
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Hi,

I have recently purchased an NVIDIA A40. I have attempted to use the GPU on multiple servers (including VMs as well as on host; Windows and Linux (multiple kernels/flavors) with multiple driver versions), and other than seeing the 3D Controller in lspci, I am unable to use the card at all (never was able to get nvidia-smi to find the card, and in Windows the driver is never able to successfully start). As far as I can tell, I have a DOA card.

Does the displayless mode prevent the device from working except in vGPU? If I use the displaymodeselector, will that let me use it like a normal RTX A6000 or RTX 8000? I’m at my wits end here before spending the 2-3 months doing an RMA with my distributor.

Thank you!

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Was there an outcome with this? I have 2 A40 on an Epyc server (gigabyte) and Im having problems with GPU Passthrough.

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We managed to use a personal connection to talk to someone at NVIDIA, who spoke to someone else on our behalf. NVIDIA would not allow us to have displaymodeselector as the reason we gave was apparently not sufficient for them.

We ended up sending it back to our distributor for testing (at our expense). They sent it back to Asia (they claim it was sent back to NVIDIA directly). NVIDIA sent them a screenshot of a successful functional test and said the card was fine. They are in the process of sending it back to us now.

We’re pretty pissed. We bought a $5k paperweight. We’re going to just take the loss, put it in a closet and never make the mistake of buying a state of the art card again, especially from NVIDIA. Unless you shell out money for enterprise support, they have zero support on their graphic cards. They’ve got a cornered market, they know it, so there’s no reason to actually help people.

I hope your luck is better.

Edit: It looks like they now allow you to download the tool directly. That seems to have changed from 6 months ago. Once we get the card back, we’ll give that a try. https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-display-mode-selector-tool-home

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Thank you so much for posting this! I can confirm that I was able to get graphics to work on an A40 using the tool

[root@testhost]# ./displaymodeselector --gpumode graphics --auto