Passthrough on current windows system

Nicholas_Primiano · December 26, 2020, 6:09am

I have my existing windows system set up as a VM on an ubuntu host. Is there a way to set up a gpu passthrough without fresh windows install?

Airstripone · December 26, 2020, 7:45am

Welcome to the community.

Yes this should just work. Follow one of the vfio guides…

VFIO in 2019 -- Pop!_OS How-To (General Guide though) [DRAFT] VFIO

The Ultimate (Same GPU) VFIO Passthrough Guide for 2019 (now notes on getting samey graphics cards working) What are we doing? What is VFIO/Passthrough? If you are an absolute newbie – all the hub-ubb is about being able to run Linux as your primary OS, with a Windows virtual machine running under Linux for everything else. The key aspect here, though, is that you are running a computer with two graphics cards and full control over one graphics card is given to the Windows virtual machine. That means you can run games and GPU-accelerated apps (like the Adobe creative suite) just like they were running on a full computer, but in a virtual machine. Windows in a VM gives you great flexibility for backups, snapshots and versioning. It gives you better control over your privacy and what the operating system might be doing and it means that Windows only runs on your computer when you have to. I’ve been running VFIO for about 10 years and I have found that I rarely even need Windows for much of anything in my personal computation needs these days (even for gaming). Still, there is some usefulness in having the ‘security blanket’ of being able to get to your old Windows install exactly as it was before you switched operating systems without having to reboot. The System (76) For this guide, we are using Pop!_OS from System76 as our Linux distro of choice. I got to borrow Eric Raymond’s new computer, a monster 32-core Threadripper 2990WX system and, for this guide, it is equipped with dual Nvidia RTX 2080s from Gigabyte (Eric ultimately gets a WX7100 graphics card). Our Hardware This is the System76 Thelio Major r1 It has: AMD Threadripper 2990WX (2x) Gigabyte RTX 2080 GPUs (4x) 16gb Dual Rank Kingston HyperX 2933 DDR4 (16-18-18-36 1T @ 2933) Samsung SM97x 2tb NVMe Intel 750 1.2tb NVMe (guest OS) Arctic Cooling fans With Lutris/DXVK and Steam on Linux – I like the idea of having the same GPU horsepower for both guest and host. This system? It has two Gigabyte RTX…

… And when the instruction says install windows, just attach your existing virtual disk.

I’d suggest cloning it as a backup first though.

Good luck