Just for giggles - ASRock Linux Support...or lack of!

Got an ASRock Z97 Extreme6 a few weeks back, dropped 14.10 on and use KVM for a few different bits and bobs. I chose this board for the stated Vt-d capabilities as I wanted to attempt PCI device passthrough which I've successfully managed now with both a Nvidia GTX 650 card and a DVB-S2 card to different VM's.

However in the process of setting up the host I noticed that when I set 'intel_iommu=on' the HDMI audio on the host stops working and I can only use the analogue out. I googled around, ended up raising a lauchpad bug report and found a few other posts suggesting it could be the vendors implementation of the EFI that was to blame. Anyway I decided raise a support ticket with ASRock and shared with them my google results to see what would happen...

The first response was basically that ASRock don't officially support linux on there desktop boards but they'd refer the ticket onto their colleagues in Taiwan to see if they could help. After a little chasing I got a reply where they had actually tested the problem but had obviously either not understood the scenario (host only) or the nuances had been lost in translation...they had attempted to install Windows 8.1 inside an ESXi host and pass through the boards HDMI audio controller...I got a nice little screen shot showing me their efforts :confused:. So I kindly pointed out the very subtle differences of my problem vs. their testing and yesterday I got this email...

I personally wasn't surprised by the lack of support and I was actually a little shocked when they had attempted to replicate the scenario which shows some willing...does any hardware vendor offer end user linux support to desktop communities (i.e. non-enterprise customers)?

Anyway's, thought I'd share but will keep researching my audio problem, probably post elsewhere in the forums for some advice.