Physical display not being used in Manjaro VM

Operating Systems & Open Source Virtualization
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Hello,

I recently put together a new system with the intention of using it as a home server and virtualization host. My hardware specs are:

  • Ryzen 9 5900X
  • 128 GB DDR4-3200
  • Asrock X570 Taichi
  • GTX 1650
  • RX 6600
  • 2x 1TB WD SN850X
  • 2TB WD SN850X
  • 7x 16TB WD Gold HDD

I’m running TrueNAS Scale, and trying to use GPU passthrough to run a Manjaro VM to use as a desktop. I’m currently just testing the setup, but hope to eventually replace the GTX 1650 with the RTX 3070 from my PC and use VMs for gaming, development, and general computing.

I’ve successfully gotten the GPU passed through to the VM, but haven’t had much luck beyond that.

At first I was using Kubuntu 24.04 as a guest OS, but after installing the OS in my VM I found that any attempt to log in would result in a loading screen, a freeze, and then I’d be back at the login screen.
I tried a couple of different versions of Kubuntu, and Ubuntu, but had no luck.

I then switched to Manjaro 24.0.5 Cinamon, and was able to install the OS, and sign in and get to a desktop (via TrueNAS SPICE virtual display). I checked that the GTX 1650 was detected by lspci, installed the Nvidia drivers, rebooted, and got nothing.
The Nvidia X Server settings application detects the GPU, shows settings, fan speed, etc. It detects that there is a display connected to it, and it detects the displays resolution, EDID name, etc. But there’s no image on the display, and it doesn’t appear in the Manjaro Display Settings application.

When I search for other people having similar problems, they seem to all be using laptops and just need to install optimus-manager, but I don’t have an iGPU so that doesn’t help.

I tried messing around with xorg.conf, but haven’t had any luck.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Also, this is my first post here on the L1T forums, so let me know if I’ve categorized or tagged it wrong.

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Not a direct response to your problem, but just an advise before you waste too much time on the topic.

If you plan to game on Windows VM, have in mind that many games have problems with playing nice with VMs because of DRM engines or anti-cheat software not wanting to run properly in virtualized environment. Check your games against that before fully transitioning to VMs.

As for your problem, just to clarify - do you use TrueNAS Scale on bare metal and run it as hypervisor, or do you have your TrueNAS virtualized on different hypervisor? If former, have you tried testing different hypervisor, like Proxmox and trying to passthrough your GPU? Maybe it will do a better job, as a specialized hypervisor software compared to basic adaptation in TrueNAS Scale? If it does, you could move your TrueNAS to VM after that.

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I’m hoping to get away with not using virtualized windows for gaming as much as possible. I’ve checked ProtonDB, and most of the games I want to play are rated gold or platinum, so I’m optimistic that I won’t need to run windows. If I’m really lucky, I won’t have to run windows at all, but that’ll take a lot of learning, since most of my linux experience up to this point is headless servers and containers in the cloud, or on Raspberry Pi.

I am running TrueNAS Scale on bare metal. I know some people run TrueNAS on top of Proxmox, which I have some experience with, but I want to use TrueNAS for all of my storage needs, and I think that running Proxmox on baremetal, with TrueNAS in a VM, then having other VMs using virtualized TrueNAS for storage is overly complicated and asking for problems. I’m also considering using Backblaze B2 for backup, and as far as I’m aware Proxmox doesn’t natively support that. The only thing I can find when searching for Proxmox backup solutions is Proxmox Backup. With TrueNAS, I’m pretty sure I can easily backup the entire machine to B2 (probably leaving out a few datasets that are full of steam games or music that I can rip off of CDs again if needed).
In addition to the backup thing, I plan to run most of my home-server type services on Kubernetes anyway, so I’ll only have a handful of VMs, one for k8s, one for gaming, one or two for development, and maybe one for other general computing uses.

If I were confident that things would “just work” on Proxmox, then I would consider switching and deal with backup some other way. But from what I’ve seen doing research on this, I think that Proxmox is better, but also has its share of issues and oddities. And since I’ve gotten to the point where I can see the GPU from the VM with relative ease, I’m pretty confident I can get this to work. I think the issue I’m having now is more of a guest OS level problem than a hardware/hypervisor problem.