Thank you!
Thank you to everyone at Level1Techs for my Devember20201 Prize 
I still can’t believe I was one of the winners. If you’re curious this (My devember project) is my project.
So what did you get???
I was lucky enough to get an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 and here it is installed in my P.C. (please no hate for the dust and cable management 
)
Cool story bro but what did you do with it?
So my host p.c. is Debian 10 Buster with the following specs:
(Note the old and busted GT 730 and the new and shiny GTX 1080!!!11111)
I want to use use my prize for two things; to play games and to run AI/ML projects on my own hardware (this is a thing I do in some other places and it would be nice to have the hardware to play at home). To this end, I am using QEMU/KVM as the hypervisor combo with virt-manager for GUI lazyness.
My p.c. was originally built for use basically headless use with Xen and as an Englishman I cannot say this strongly enough when I say that Xen is a both a bounder and cad and should jolly well be avoided at all costs! I love the config files and a lot of the way that Xen does things but it caused me so much grief over the years. It was such a pain in the arse when it came to major updates of Xen or the underlying OS. I also did not have a great experience with the community which was sad. So after completing the tasks I built this machine for, I nuked and paved Xen from my life and never looked back.
I have since been using VMWare Worksation Pro for my light VM needs. I run my staging environment there and some other tinkering VMs. I went with VMWare Pro because I hate Oracle basically. I had wanted to really expand my homelab with GNS3 (you should totally look into this; it’s awesome!) but I have yet to get around to this.
Unfortunately only ESXI has PCI pass through capabilities so enter QEMU/KVM. I hate windows and will only be installing Linux (maybe some BSD) so KVM is a nice addition here and for this case, I’m also not overly paranoid about what I’m running in the VMs.
So on to the details...
First I isolate the card and make sure it’s using the vfio-pci driver:
(Note the 0th step was to install the card in the third slot on my mobo so the host still has graphics via the GT 730)
Next I set up a virtual machine and give it 5 CPUs with 2 threads each and 20GB of RAM…
I pass through the GTX 1080 PCI controllers to the host as well which are the two PCI devices listed as passed through above.
I’m starting off with my gaming VM as it’s a bit more challenging for me to set up than an AI/ML VM. Also, I’m quite excited to play games in reasonable quality!
So given Valve’s recent choices of distrobution, the way ahead was clear; shining through the dark like an obnoxiously bright halogen light…
Here is the VM:
Once I realised the convenient excuse provided by Valve the temptation to lean harder into the meme was too great and I was powerless to resist. So of course I use DWM and ST. I haven’t riced it yet but honestly it’s good enough as is for the moment.
I installed the NVIDIA drivers in the VM:
and finally, after many years of appalling graphics and not being able to run proton, here is steam with proton installed and non-linux games work great!
Once I have satiated my thirst on some games, I’ll whip up an AI/ML VM and get on with some personal projects. I have a few things I’m interested in and want to use my own hardware for. I do well realise the limitations of my card and my work machines are laughing at it openly but it’s my card and I’m very happy with it!
Many thanks again!