Dual Graphics VM?

Just got here from watching the L1Tech youtube videos. It was mentioned a few times about building a linux PC and then using a second graphics card to switch to windows gaming.

Are there any articles here where I can learn about this? Preferably in the most basic new guy friendly type learning material?

Thanks in advance L1

Rob

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if you search for VFIO there are more then 50 posts:

https://forum.level1techs.com/search?q=vfio

or the first one when i searched for: vfio ubuntu guide

You can also search on youtube:: level1tech vfio

There are some caveats thoe, The windows nvidia driver will go into error 43 if it realises it is virtualised, But there are wayes to get around it. So it seems like a non issue.

And vega cards have a reset issue, So if you crash the WM you will need to restart the host. And i think that is also an issue on the 590 card

The latest video in The Linux channel also mentioned an upcoming video turtorial for manjaro.

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We are a treasure trove of information here. You want to start at looking glass and basic passthrough, both of which we have articles on.

Welcome to the forum.

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Heya welcome, like mentioned there’s an infinite amount of posts if you search for ‘vfio’ ‘iommu’ ‘gpu passthrough’.

Looking glass is, in modest terms, pretty neat so be sure to check out what the fuzz is about.

As for a newbie-friendly intro to the stuff above? Here’s an ancient thread that should give the basic idea:

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Everyone of you brought some great things to the discussion and got me looking at different options. @Baz I just want to say the post you shared might be exactly what im looking for on my old desktop. Its an old i7 with win 7 on it. I think I can give it new life now with windows in vm. So far im playing with manjaro as I like the feel of it better than fedora and ubuntu.

@Enwyn You gave me allot to research. I will dive right in and find the best option for the PC im going to build at some point. Hopefully before next tax season. :slight_smile:

@FaunCB Thanks for the welcome.

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You said Fedora;
I think the initial guides written by Wendell were for Fedora, I’m I am mentioning this becose my prefered way of learning is to just dive in. And then as i get problems. I reasearch the issues.

This is a proper article and it also includes a video, At the time i belive he stated that Fedora had the easiest way to get everything up and running:

You are ofc also welcome to ask us for help. But there is a good chance you might find that someone has asked the question previously on this very forum.

There are allot of guides on here as well as some videos from wendel on the channel although they manly focus on arch and fedora as the host system. This is the guide I used for setting up my system and have a nice writeup which makes it pretty easy/quick to setup: https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/

That guide was really really good, but GRUB!! I use POP!_OS, so I have systemd, I need to know how I do that with that bootloader instead, because I am not going to install GRUB just to be able to follow that guide.

I think I will try to write a new Guide just to share, based on that one, when I have collected enough information, there should be 1 pinned guide here, that gives out the info about INTEL, AMD, nVIDIA, then GRUB, SYSTEMD, LILO and what ever people are using for a bootloader these days… Wait?! Is Liilo even a thing anymore? I liked Lilo, but grub was so much easier to use… Well, it looked better anyway, Lilo was the easy one. haha