VT-d/IOMMU is a minimum requirement but even then you may have issues.
Check out the hardware compatibility link near the end of this page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
If I'm gaming on the guest (windows) I would want it to have the better GPU no?
I'm sure you would. You could try your luck with passing through the 980ti
You could go out and buy a cheap amd card to temporarily use for the host and pass-through the 980 to see if it works. If it does you could stick with the cheap amd card for the host or upgrade it if you want
The issue is the the Nvidia drivers giving Error 40 when installed in a VM under KVM. You can get the hardware to passthrough just fine. You can get around this by disabling all KVM extensions in your script or XML file for your VM. This does however detriment performance by 5%.
For the record I am doing something similar to this with an ASRock motherboard and a socket 2011. Managed to get hard drives to passthrough the PCI bus through VirtIO. Those drivers you'll need to get from Fedora's website, as they are not on Windows update (for Windows 7 at least). I have a GTX 970 and an GT 610 for the host. The 970 passes through just fine, with the aforementioned "fix".
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If I do that then the 980 Ti will be used and if it does not work?
I could return mine for (2) R9 390's and have money left over lol :)
If it doesn't work then I suppose you'd have to return the 980ti and try another card.
2x 390s
Guess you could but unless you want to also game in Linux you don't need that beefy of a card :)
Ok so if buying a n ew card for the host what would you get? I'd have to spend the credit there with newegg to not take a hit on the restocking fees. And now that I think of it I might need to swap my PSU as well.....
Damn.....
If you want to keep your 980 Ti I think an R9 370 or 270 would suffice for Linux. I personally would go for 2x390s, but that's because I do more with Linux.
I'm still thinking that as it leaves me setup for X-Fire later if all the games I want to play become playable on Linux.......
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Exactly. I eventually plan to get a 390 for Linux and use my 7870 for the guest. A single 390 will pull through just about anything.
Just wished I hit this Linux moment before I ordered all of this stuff lol. I was like well all my stuff is mostly ordered and I'm bored let me try Linux, and that was all she wrote. In two days I got my Acer and my wife's macbook pro both running mint17.2/cinnamon lol. I did have a lot of help from some good people here on the Tek could not have done it all alone.
So as it stands will be returning a GPU, and most likely the PSU I ordered, and will look into the motherboard more, as mine only has one intel NIC connection......
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This is why there is still a place for AMD vs Nvidia and why the 390 isn't the only viable card.
I personally don't like Nvidia as a company. They contribute nothing to the open source movement and stating the 970 had 4gb of VRAM was a shit move. The cards themselves are fine. I recommend the 980 Ti to MOST people however for those of us on Linux a dual card AMD setup is invaluable.
I agree with you and was going to get a 390 but fell into extra cash for the build and whether we like Nvidia or not the 980 Ti is the current top dog, Titan X performance for a lot less money. At that point in my build too Linux was a vague idea in the back of my mind. Just glad I came to this conclusion now and not later after opening everything up and assembling it. I still have the chance to return and exchange whatever need be to make this as easy as possible hardware wise. And it's kinda sick to think I can get (2) 390's and have like $100 left in exchange for my 980 Ti Hybrid lol......
I need that image as a high res wallpaper for all of my PCs
Guys, PC Partpicker is saying 791 Watts for my build with (2X) R9 390's, do you think an 850 Watt PSU is enough or should I swap it out for something bigger?
Thanks
Can you elaborate more on this?
Sorry posted in a hurry. I'll elaborate
VT-d or IOMMU support is required on the CPU and motherboard for hardware passthrough to work, but actual implementation can differ from board to board. In practice not all boards, typically consumer boards, that claim IOMMU support on paper actually handle passthrough of PCIe devices properly.
The page I linked includes a link to this google doc:
It is a compilation of user submitted hardware compatibility reports for KVM with GPU passthrough. If you prefer, you can pick parts from this list for a known good configuration.
The wiki page itself contains useful information including other great links, so I suggest reading through it.
This link in particular is a must read: http://vfio.blogspot.com/
Lastly, this is a much smaller dataset, but there was thread here some time ago where a few of us posted known working hardware configurations for GPU passthrough:
https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/pci-passthrough-known-working-hardware/84152
I got ya back mah man.
Made a quick resize edit.
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+1
Generally, implementation on AMD boards is better because AMD has stricter rules with regards to the obligation of OEM's to implement all the chipset features. Intel basically only provided half-arses virtualization support itself on non-Xeon parts and non C-chipsets, and there is absolutely no requirement for OEM's to implement these features. Many motherboard manufacturers will prefer to implement PLX chips on the PCI bus for instance to market boards for "gaming" and catch a premium for a lesser product, because those chips will kill IOMMU compatibility. On the Intel side, most consumer boards other than the latest generations of SOHO-workstation-orientated boards, have some kind of IOMMU bugs or incompatibilities. On the AMD side, the only boards I know off that have stubborn issues with implementing the standard AMD chipset features, especially IOMMU, are Asus boards, but those can be solved by installing a bug patching bios that Asus refuses to label as stable but has had beta status for years while being more stable and functional than the "stable" bios release. Some very cheap (sub 60 bucks) AMD boards from Gigabyte and AsRock have "or" instead of "and" features, like when you use IOMMU, something else will not perform to the maximum ability, but IOMMU will generally always work on AMD boards. On Intel boards for consumer and enthusiast consumer use, less than half will actually do IOMMU without issues, that is if they can do it at all. Generally, if you don't need the extra features, it's better to get a business class chipset based board for Intel, like a B or H series chipset, than a Z series "enthusiast consumer/gamer", because not only do the B or H boards often provide better graphics performance for PCIe GPU's than Z-chipset boards, they also usually don't block IOMMU. The fact that an Intel chipset board doesn't block IOMMU (e.g. because of chips to split PCIe lanes so that the speed of the lanes comes down and IOMMU is blocked but they can market it as an "SLI" or "XFire" "gaming" board and charge a hefty premium), doesn't mean that the OEM has also implemented IOMMU in the BIOS. A big part of Intel chipset boards do not. Many OEM's and Intel itself seem to be convinced that consumers should not preoccupy themselves with virtualization, and if a customer wants that, he should buy from the enterprise product range.
Check out the forum on this to know more, it was extensively discussed about 1.5 years ago, when passthrough was still kinda hot. It's a pretty old solution now (it was hot 4-5 years ago), and as I stated months ago, I wouldn't really bother with it nowadays any more, not with Valve switching to SteamOS as main commercial platform just over two months from now. I would just not install Windows any more on a "good machine", but rather keep an old PC with Win7 on it or something for occasional entertainment use. Windows 10 has been reduced to a bare minimum in comparison to Windows 8 and Windows 7 before that, which were also reductions already from Vista. Windows 10 full install with Office and full complement of productivity, enterprise grade connectivity and communications and a full complement of third party enterprise grade security software and virtualization software, is now under 30 GB. Windows 8 without compressed boot image still needed about 50-60% more storage space for that. Windows 10 starts up slower than Windows 8 because some of the system files are compressed by default to reduce the storage footprint, which was not the case in Windows 8, but in general, a stripped Windows 10 install will both be reasonably fast for a Windows install, and have a reasonably small footprint. That makes it ideal for use on older devices or in virtual machines. Not as ideal as any Linux distro, but for a commercial product, finally it's not half bad and it's somewhere manageable to run as a virtual machine for specific commercial entertainment purposes.
It's also much cheaper now for companies to offer cloud-based high-performance applications. We've seen those on Android and iOS, with things like WeVideo on Android for instance, rendering videos in a fraction of the time it would take on even a powerful workstation PC, because the workload is deferred to a powerful cloud server arrangement. IBM for instance is scoring very well with it's new "One" series of mainframes, based on the computationally very efficient RISC hardware that is freely scalable and is offered only with RHEL, SLES and now also with Ubuntu Server, instead of also offering IBM's own z/OS. The One Emperor can run up to 8000 high performance virtual machines at once, which is phenomenal, yet the cost of ownership as well as the investment load for acquiring such a server from IBM, have dropped considerably through the new cost spreading arrangements IBM offers enterprise customers, making a more manageable mainframe solution economically much more viable than Xeon-based server clusters, while offering more modular and more efficient performance. Technologies like docker and similar application virtualization solutions aimed at cloud deployment, are fully functional, and the application development for them is accelerating rapidly. First the enterprise market will be served, but inevitably, the entertainment industry comes next. Windows can't handle this, but Linux and OSX/iOS can, and they will. It's just a matter of time until consumers of entertainment software services will need *nix units to get their entertainment fix, and even if Windows would implement some kind of compatibility, it would also come at a price that consumers probably will not accept because they have easier than ever access to Linux-based solutions.
The model of the near future for gaming and next-gen entertainment software is a cloud model. Most of the money in the industry these days comes from customers that don't have heavy gaming PC's, but rather mobile devices and limited hardware or software consoles (software consoles also for example being a non-passthrough virtual machine running an instance of SteamOS, Windows, or any other software console of choice to have access to commercial entertainment without compromising IT security and fundamental user rights). The reason heavy gaming PC's became a necessity to play games is because of the inefficient and poor quality windows environment and the games written for it. Other platforms don't have that handicap, so if you have a good modern system and you prepare for next-gen gaming, your system will be good for a much longer period in time because it will be super powerful in regards of the hardware requirements for the software, which leaves system resources to spare for next-gen stuff like 3D viewing and control devices. It's like all of the infiniminer clones: Minetest for instance remained close to the initial idea of infiniminer and is programmed in C and entirely free and open source, whereas Minecraft copied the concept to be programmed in java. Minetest will run flawlessly on a 4 year old entry level single/dual core Android phone, whereas minecraft might not even perform all that well on a pretty fast quad core x86 PC. They both look the same and do the same, both have a lot of community mods and very similar graphics and gameplay, yet there is a world of difference in terms of performance, just because of the inherent difference in performance of the platform (although Android basically is a java environment running on a abstraction layer on Linux), and the inherent much higher coding quality of open source software in comparison to closed source software (Right now, Microsoft tries to relaunch Minecraft reprogrammed in C++ because of the popularity of less capable hardware devices like the Surface-class tablets, which don't offer a thermal solution that allows full PC performance even with expensive modern CPU/GPU arrangements).
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That's not entirely true, I managed to pass my gpu on an ASUS M5A97 Evo r2 with the official bios.