Are there any ways to determine how well IOMMU will work on a laptop, Befor buying it? The Goal is to allow GPU Passthrough
If you have a succes story with your laptop please post Brand and Model 
I’m currently looking at
Added ‘help desk’ tag so people know you need help
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Thank you
chances are you won’t be able to get it working for passthrough, and if it is one of the more expensive dual-mux nvidia designs, there’s no guarantee the bios will let you change all the requisite virtualization features.
What makes you say that?
that’s how essentially all superficially viable laptops work.
Nvidia laptops either display everything through the igpu framebuffer (so the potential guest card has no way of displaying anything) or a software muxed system that implodes when you try to isolate the cards from each other.
If you are lucky enough to get a model that has a double hardware mux, or an MXM 3 based system, then you also have to hope that the OEM didn’t just disable igpu support entirely.
So, of the extremely limited set of models that will work with passthrough, you also have issues like bios whitelisting (for eGPU) locked down feature support, etc. etc.
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If you meant Nvidia optimus i read that G-synced enebled laptops don’t use it it because the nature of Gsync won’t allow it
Not having optimus doesn’t guarantee you get a double mux, though.
I’d search around on places like /r/vfio for specific models people have gotten to work rather than rolling the dice one one if it’s a feature you actually care to use.
Mentions GVT stuff comming to kernel 4.11 will include a virtual Intel card do you or anyone else know anything about that? We are almost at kernel 4.20/5.0 now right?
gvt is for sharing the integrated gpu on intel chips.
If anything is gonna work, it’ll more likely be one of the custom laptops you can order with 2x discrete MXM cards in, i’d have thought. Possibly also use a custom/hacked BIOS to enable “features” that aren’t generally available too.
I’d love to see this done. Wonder if Looking Glass could be adapted to work on a laptop with onboard graphics and a discrete card?
In my country and most of EU you can try a laptop before keeping it. Maybe we can make a list of Laptops that will work. I don’t know too much about linux to make gpu passthrough work within the “test before you buy period” tho 
The information about this is so scattered and vague it would be great if we could get some clarity on this so
If you have a succes story with your laptop please post Brand and Model
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What’s the use case? If you don’t care about reducing mobility, could one of those old USB 2 “GPUs” help? IIUC, it’d add a completely separate GPU for host that’d go through the chipset. I’m not sure how IOMMU groups are divvied up, but I’d guess that it’d be easier to separate USB devices connected to the PCH from the PCIe bus than the iGPU.
IOGEAR USB 2.0 External VGA Video Card GUC2015V https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000NJFJJK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_0cAEBbWE2G67W
It is poor performance over Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps while usb 2 is 480 Mbps) so i sincerely doubt it would do any gud for gaming
Sorry, I meant the other way around… give the non-gaming host the USB 2.0 “GPU”, and pass the internal discrete GPU (and whatever comes along with it) to the gaming guest.
This is the uncertainity that this topic is about. How can you know if the laptop internels even allows GPU passthrough
Oh… I wasn’t aware that was a possibility. I thought the question was just about whether the discrete GPU and integrated GPU were on different IOMMU groups. Sorry, it seems I got ahead of myself.
I may have found a contender
This laptop has a Seperate GPU(unsoldered)
MSI GT75 8RG
Tear down (GPU removal at 6:00)
However It uses a Killer Wifi Ac-1550
i found this
It said the ac 1550i chip driver was added to kernel 4.17?
Also it uses an Aquantia Multi Gig Lan for which i found
My question is how well this laptop will work under Linux and specifically GPU- Pass through?
Are there any things i can check the moment the laptop arrives, that would tell me if GPU Pass through can be done? like Bios options or maybe there is a simple check i can run while booted?