iGPU passthrough to Mac VM on ESXi

First off, let me apologize as I'm aware this is not the exact topic this subreddit is for. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find one where it fits well (even posted it in r/vfio before I realized how dumb I was being), and I've seen several successful posts of what I'm attempting here.

I have a Catalina 10.15.7 vm running on one of my ESXi hosts. I'm mostly using it as a development platform and it runs alright. I don't have any gpu acceleration though obviously, so I'd like to pass my i5-7600T igpu (HD 630) through to the vm. Unfortunately, whenever I try doing this, the vm fails to boot. In the future I'd also like to run a display from this igpu, if possible, but that's not the priority right now.

I've tried adding the iGPU both using DirectPathIO and Dynamic DirectPath IO (following these guides), both cause the vm to fail to boot. I either get one of two errors:

I've added configuration parameters in ESXi for pciHole.start and pciHole.end (which don't apply anymore I believe), as well as hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = false. This last one changed the error. The vm still doesn't boot, but it now shows the no-symbol instead.

Without those parameters, I receive a message stating your computer restarted because of a problem. Then it just boot loops.

I appreciate any help getting this to work. I'm aware this is not a "supported" setup by any means. I was just hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction. Other people have managed to get gpu's passed through, and it's on the Catalina Buyer's Guide. Or should I just deal with the lack of graphic acceleration?

submitted by /u/dsmiles
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