Recently I switched my i5 2500k to i7 2600 (more threads and VT-d). VT-d option in UEFI (Asrock z68 Pro3) has became active and i could switch the option ON.
GPU and Monitors
My main GPU is Radeon HD7850, second is this Intel built into i7 cpu. My monitor (LC24F390FHUXEN) has D-SUB and HDMI and i can switch between them easily.
Sound
I have Fiio E10 USB sound card which i want to leave for host. Monitor has some speakers and jack for headphones and this is what i want to use on Windows guest. I think it would be easier to pass trough GPU Audio than integrated audio on Asrock mobo right?
Storage
I have 1TB separate HDD for Windows only stuff. Second is my 500GB with common stuff.
So basically i think im ready to go with PCI Passtrough thing. But there is a few questions …
I wanted to make virtual drive for widows system and mount 1TB some way directly to VM. Would it be better (or easier) to buy SATA PCI-E controller and connect this disk to it, make additional partiotion for windows on it and passtrough whole controller?
Do PCI devices can be passtrough the same way as PCI-E. I mean i think it should work the same way but im not certain. I want to passtrough some old USB 2.0 extension card.
Ive seen some tuts about getting passtrough done. Most are basically similar and based od Arch Wiki. But i want to use Fedora and ive seen that Wendels tutorial (dracut) about it is a little bit different than Arch way (Seabios etc). Should i follow Wendels tutorial if im using Fedora or stick with Archs instructions.
You will need to pass this through whether you want to use it or not since the AMD driver will be unstable otherwise (if it doesn’t find the device). If you can passthrough the onboard audio depends on the IOMMU groupings.
No need as far as I read, you can just passthrough a block device (aka HDD).
Again depends on the grouping, but generally yes.
Personally I’d go with wendells route and when that doesn’t work try something else, but then again I didn’t try it myself (yet). I need that new PC
Well i sucessfully passed trough my GPU but there are some issues with performance. I get some often hickups in Diablo 3 and Shadow of Mordor stucks at circle loading icon (which stutters a little bit as well). I suspect its because i used SATA as protocol for my block devices and AFAIK IDE and SATA has worst performance in virtual environment …
So either i will have to reinstall Windows with VirtIO drivers (as i didnt find a way to install them on installed os) or maybe i should try first idea - passing trough some SATA controller with boot function.
I reinstalled windows with VirtIO, performance raised but still couldnt get SoM working. So i set CPU topology manually and allowed VM to use all 8 threads. And finally game did run! The only minor issue i had with AMD Audio device which didnt work. But i installed its drivers separately by updating in the device manager and it started to work as well.