After the cnic_register message is stuck on the console, you still need to wait a few minutes for ESXi to finish booting; there will be no indication of progress. The handoff of pcie control is somewhere in the middle of the bootup procedure. When the card is passed to a guest, the guest takes over the card when powered on and replaces the frozen console screen
Don't know if you've done this or not, but I had to be careful of which host usb controllers I selected for passthrough to VMs. It seems ESXi doesn't like it too much when you passthrough the port that its flash drive is connected to Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
. I think I had to reinstall ESXi and reconfigure the host after that one. Haha. Now that I have all the "unknown" devices mapped to the corresponding ID, that shouldn't be a problem
