PCIe passthrough with just one graphics card and no IGP

derstef · February 18, 2018, 8:38pm

Hi, i’ve seen some of the PCIe videos and think i’ve understood most of what wendell showed there.
But i was wondering if its possible to have a Linux host OS and several Windows guests with one of them having the graphics card used. So no graphics for the Host, just SSH access via Putty on one of the guests. This way i can keep control over what the guests are sending home to MS and starting them on demand (hard user/usecase seperation for example). Have anybody done this already? Linux should boot fine without any graphics adapter, right?

Baz · February 18, 2018, 8:44pm

It’s doable, but I don’t have first-hand experience. @Vitalius how’d it work out?

Configuring a headless Linux OS installation strictly for virtualizing then managing a Windows installation? Linux

So, I’ve been looking into configuring a system to where Linux is the host OS, but when the system boots, as far as the user is concerned, Windows is being ran. This would mean GPU & USB passthrough, hiding a GRUB menu unless a key is pressed during boot, and somehow giving Linux a “remote only” desktop. As well as the machine having two IP addresses. One for the Linux host and one for the Windows guest. I feel like this is very doable, but it seems like a lot of specific customizations. In terms of what Distribution to use, I’d be split between Arch (due to a small footprint and the latest updates for security) and Fedora (stable and usable without knowing much about the command line, but more software that wouldn’t be used and would need to be upgraded yearly). The point of doing this would be to allow for system snapshots, and ease of maintenance on machines. Cloning a Windows installation without issues is harder than just moving a snapshot of the OS. Right now, I just recreate the partition table manually in a terminal, then clone each partition using dd. This works in that I never see a “Activate Windows” watermark, but moving a snapshot would be less tedious. So given all this information, my question is: Does something like this already exist? Is there a Linux distribution specifically for this or geared towards headless virtualization? I’m actually tempted to use Fedora Server OS because it has a very nice GUI that’s created by default for monitoring the system. An example: [image] [image] This isn’t perfectly ideal, as a GUI for managing snapshots and checking strange network behavior would be best, but I don’t expect to get everything I want all at once.

Vitalius · February 19, 2018, 7:54am

TL;DR: It didn’t due to the hardware.

PetebLazar · February 19, 2018, 2:04pm

Try search “boot vga passthrough” in Google.

I’m using boot VGA (GTX 1080Ti) for GuestOS1(Win10 or Xubuntu17.10).
Second VGA(HD5770) for GuestOS2(WinXP)
Third VGA(RX550) for HostOS(Xubuntu 17.10).

derstef · February 20, 2018, 7:32pm

Tnx, but as i mentioned id like to stay with only one GPU in the system and have a terminal only or remote desktop only linux host system.

PetebLazar · February 21, 2018, 7:24am

I understand. Only one GPU (dedicated to GuestOS) mean “boot VGA” passthrough.

Gizme · February 21, 2018, 4:21pm

I am doing this at the moment on my server.

The way i did it was by disabling the video bios in the system uefi under the CSM settings.

The “downside” is that in order to change anything in the uefi you will have to reset the settings but once you have everything setup this is not really an issue.