Is it possible to make a PCI VM work when its shut down? what I mean by this is when you shut down the VM, X does not crash and control is returned to Linux, say rebind or reallow use of the bound devices when VM is running?
Any ideas?
Thanks
Booting UEFI with the VM and having a UEFI card helps a ton. On my setup I have it to where I can start and shut down windows and its fine, but I never take over the passed through graphics card in between. I do have a separate boot menu entry that doesn't pass through the graphics card and that works, but it requires a reboot.
On MBR/Legacy booting, I always had trouble shutting down/starting up the VM a second time with passthrough. But in UEFI mode it seems to be a lot more stable and I can start and stop the VM a lot.
So basically its just binding at boot? How would I go about creating a separate entry to GRUB-efi so its blacklisted completely?
You can create a custom boot entry by adding an entry in the /etc/grub.d/40_custom, then doing grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg (or grub2-mkconfig, depending on distribution).
I created the entry in 40_custom by simply copying the auto-generated entry in /boot/grub/grub/cfg and modifying the kernel command line arguments (keep the initramfs unless you need to modify that too for vfio-pci).
You do need to do some maintenance when you install a new kernel version, depending on how your distro names the kernels (for arch is always vmlinuz, so the custom entry will always boot the latest kernel).