Luke D Iremadze | UI/UX, Fullstack Developer & Everything in Between

My hardware recomendations/assumptions

Get at least 2 x 512 GB fast storage drives to be put in RAID 1 configuration with Proxmox for boot drive and for other vm boot drives
This guide is running for version 8.*
Proxmox will be installed as UEFI

Installation

BIOS

Set the boot to UEFI
Enable virtualization

After install

Configure for no subscription and get latest updates 1

Edit/create the following file: nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-no-enterprise.list

Paste the following in the file:

# not for production use
deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription

Run

apt-get update

apt dist-upgrade

reboot

Check SMART reports 1

smartctl -a /dev/sda

Replace /dev/sda with the appropriate hard drive address

IOMMU (PCI Passthrough) 2

Edit the following:

nano /etc/kernel/cmdline

By appending the line with one of the two depending on the processor of the machine:

INTEL intel_iommu=on

AMD amd_iommu=on

The result should look something like this:

GNU nano 7.2                                         /etc/kernel/cmdline
root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/pve-1 boot=zfs amd_iommu=on

Now we want to have VFIO modules loaded at boot

Edit the file:

nano /etc/modules

Add the following:

vfio
vfio_iommu_type1
vfio_pci

~~vfio_virqfd~~ Use to be needed but as of Proxmox 8 it is not needed³

The result should look like:

GNU nano 7.2                                             /etc/modules
# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.
# Parameters can be specified after the module name.

vfio
vfio_iommu_type1
vfio_pci

Once that is set let's refresh the system by running the next couple of commands

proxmox-boot-tool refresh

update-initramfs -u -k all

Reboot

Blacklist drivers that will be used in passthrough:

Available options are: amdgpu, radeon, ati, nvidiafb

Edit nano /etc/modprobe.d/pve-blacklist.conf

Check if IOMMU is supported

dmesg | grep -e DMAR -e IOMMU

Output:

root@vm:/sys/bus/pci/devices# dmesg | grep -e DMAR -e IOMMU
[    0.836294] pci 0000:00:00.2: AMD-Vi: IOMMU performance counters supported
[    0.844104] pci 0000:00:00.2: AMD-Vi: Found IOMMU cap 0x40
[    0.844427] perf/amd_iommu: Detected AMD IOMMU #0 (2 banks, 4 counters/bank).

Installing and configuring proxmox