As to if your hardware is too old, you can check if your particular CPU supports VT-d, check the specs on Intel’s websites. Your motherboard should have an option to enable VT-d if it supports the tech.
I run an old ivy-bridge i7-3770 and it supports it so your Xeon may also.
For setting up GPU pass-through with iommu check out this tutorial on the forums:
Hello all! I am Gray from GrayWolfTech. I make videos on Linux and other interesting technology. Wendell has given me permission to post my written guides here for my videos. This is great for two reasons: First it helps grow this community and second my videos reach a wider audience to share what I have learned. I look forward to posting all my guides and videos here, and I am more than happy to answer any questions about the guide you may have.
– Onward! –
Now it’s time for one of the coolest and more advanced capabilities of Linux. KVM, or kernel virtual machines. We are going to go through step by step, how to setup PCI pass-through to a Windows virtual machine on a Debian host to play games!
Thanks to Redhat, KVM can run virtual machines with almost bare metal performance and supports a wide variety of other neat features. The one we are going to focus on in this video is of course, PCI pass-through. The process of allowing a virtual machine full access to a PCI express graphics card for gaming, CAD, or 3D rendering. With this neat capability, you can run Linux as your host OS, and then pass your GPU (or one of your GPUs if you have multiple) to a virtual machine to play games.
Let’s go over the requirements for this project:
First and most important, you should backup any data you have on your PC. If you know what you are doing then you will not lose anything, but accidentally selecting the wrong drive when installing can lead you to be very sad when you figure out the drive you wiped had all your really good porn on it.
Second, this process will take time. For someone who is an experienced Linux user it should take about 20 minutes (not counting time to install Debian or recompile the kernel). For someone who is new it might take longer. Make sure you allow yourself an entire afternoon or a good chunk of 4-5 hours where you could potentially not have a working PC.
Third, follow the instructions I lay out in the video. I will answer questions down belo…
I recently used this for my first GPU pass-through with ubuntu 18.04 and can confirm it works well on ubuntu even though the guy uses debian stretch.
For performance related stuff regarding your windows VM I recently made a post about how i solved my issues (issues I think many probably encounter), so check that out over here:
Following are a few tips and tricks I found useful when setting up my Linux/Windows KVM system. I spent a good week getting performance very close to bare metal, and most of that was spent searching for solutions that were all spread around, so I decided I’d make a summary post of what I consider to probably be common issues.
First things first, I will assume in this that you already got iommu working and that you already set up your Windows 10 KVM, it is booting and you already installed all the drivers like you would on a normal Windows installation.
If this is not the case go and have a look at @GrayBoltWolf ’s guide for setting up your KVM. The post may be from 2016, but the procedure is mostly the same, and works perfectly fine on Ubuntu 18.04.
Now let’s get into it.
AUDIO
One of the first things you are likely to have problems with is audio. As of right now this does not necessarily have an easy fix, but the problem probably lies with libvirt not having the required permissions to plug into pulseaudio.
There are a couple of ways to solve this, but the simplest way is to run libvirt as your user and not as root, and make sure that pulseaudio is also running as your user and not as root. To do this, simply edit /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf and uncomment the line with #user = "root" and change it to user = "$YOURUSER". You might also need to uncomment the following line in the same config file: nographics_allow_host_audio = 1.
Now if your system uses systemd, you can use systemctl enable --user pulseaudio to make sure pulseaudio is always running as your user. This might not be necessary.
If you are still having trouble try adding the following to your VM settings by running $ sudo virsh edit YOURVM and adding the <qemu:commandline> like this:
<domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>
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<qemu:commandline>
<qemu:env name='QEMU_AUDIO_DRV' value='pa'/>
<qemu:env name='QEMU_PA_SAMPLES' value='8192'/>
<qemu:env …
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