I was unable to find any recent threads or information on this, so I’m looking for current advice.
TLDR: Which motherboards should I be looking at for good VT-D support with Linux?
Planning to build a fairly high end Linux PC, but I’d like it to have VT-D support so I can boot a fast Linux VM or a Win10 VM (mostly for software testing, including 3D/OpenGL). I’ve done this a few times with older hardware, but it never quite worked as well as I’d have liked, so I’m hoping the latest generation stuff has improved support.
I want to make VT-D and GPU passthrough a top priority this time.
Here’s my starting point, although I’m somewhat flexible:
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CPU: i7 9700K (would consider Ryzen but I’m uncertain about VT-D reliability)
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1st GPU: NVidia 1080?
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2nd GPU: 390X? Probably some AMD, since I think this helps significantly with GPU passthrough. (Please correct if I’m wrong or this has changed, I recall having to blacklist one card’s driver in the past.)
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Motherboard: Undecided
, this is what I mostly need help with. It seems like Z390 motherboards are popular with this CPU, but I’m unable to find any good information to confirm VT-D will work well. If there’s another chipset that is much more reliable for VT-D… what would I be missing out on by switching to (whatever that is)? I think I’d rather not switch to a Xeon processor…
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Hard Drive: Not sure of brand but I definitely want a good M.2 drive for the main OS. I’m concerned about heat with these things, so I’ve been eyeing Gigabyte’s motherboards which have some “M.2 thermal guard” thing (not sure what that is yet).
Cost isn’t really an issue (I could upgrade or change GPUs if needed, etc.) but I don’t need absolute top of the line everything.
Using integrated graphics probably isn’t an option, partly because I want decent GPU performance on both the host bare-metal OS and the VM OS, but also because the monitor I use is near 4K and I anticipate problems (ex. HDMI 1.4).
Hoping to go with Linux Solus for the ‘bare metal’ host OS, and likely Mint for the guest. My typical workload is software development, but I do some gaming (Linux only). I’ve had GPU passthrough working before, but didn’t have luck with USB (of all things!), even with add-on cards.
How can I improve my odds of success this time around?