Hi there, I met the same problem and my thread is Nvidia-smi shows "No devices were found", and dmesg shows "rm_init_adapter failed, device minor number 0"
By following @generix 's advice, I reinstall a Ubuntu 20.04 under ESXi, do passthrough as @twine.david said (except using EFI boot), downgrade the driver to 460.84, and hold my linux driver to 5.4.0-100-generic, now I can get my GPU in nvidia-smi as follows:
