DirectStorage

Software & Operating Systems VFIO
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I’m planning a new machine, where I’d like to run Linux, and Windows in VM. I’d like to base it on X570 + Ryzen 5800x. I know that there are no games currently which support DirectStorage, but I’d like to prepare for this. So couple of questions:

  1. If I pass-through both: GPU and m.2 SSD drive, will DirectStorage work?
  2. Will it matter, if m.2 drive will be in the direct-to-cpu slot, or going through a chipset?
  3. Will it matter, if I install Windows on virtual drive (like qcow2) and just pass-through m.2 for game installs, or it’d be better to just boot Windows from the pass-through drive?

This is my first post, so hi everyone. I’m a long time follower of all Level1 stuff, just starting to have VFIO questions, and I though this is the best place to ask them.

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  1. What hypervisor are you planning to use? I know on Proxmox that if you “passthrough” a drive it actually just passes through the details of the drive and makes a virtual disk on that particular drive, the best way to do passthrough is via a PCI device but that would mean passing through the whole IOMMU group that the M.2 is connected to.

  2. From my experience it does not matter which slot they are connected to unless you start reaching the limit of lanes associated with that slot(s). Such as an M.2 slot that is shared with a PCI-E slot and you try to get 4 lanes to your M.2 when you have a GPU installed in the PCI-E slot that wants all 16 lanes so there is nothing left for the M.2 device.

  3. I recently built a new machine for work and for gaming and built it on the Ryzen platform as well and went with a 5950x and an x570 chipset. I added an Nvidia 1030 for my work VM and a 3080ti for my gaming VM. I also created a TrueNAS VM with hardware passthrough to have 4 NAS rated HDDs (could be done with SSDs as well) to serve as both an SMB share for both VMs for general file storage and also an ISCI target for the windows VM to allow for storage of software and games. The OS for both the work and gaming VMs are installed as virtual disks on mirrored ZFS NVMe disks and Proxmox which is my hypervisor of choice is installed on mirrored ZFS SSDs.

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  1. I plan to use Qemu/KVM on Arch Linux and yes, I plan to pass IOMMU groups. I’ve looked how they look on X570 on other people boards, I should be fine.

  2. My expectation as well, but I was asking specifically about DirectStorage - ability for GPU to read directly from m.2 drive.