Hello there!
I have successfully passed through a GPU to a Win 8.1 VM and everything works. Except for audio. The only audio drivers that Windows seems to recognize are the ich6 and ich9, but neither of them let me hear anything out of my host system. 15 minutes of duckduckgo have not helped me progress, I tried the vnc_allow_host_audio = 1 thing, nothing changed. For the record, I am just using ALSA if that makes any big difference.
Help would be appreciated, as the whole project would be useless without audio.
Usually when doing GPU Passthrough, we don't use virtual sound drivers. That said, vnc_allow_host_audio = 1
only works if you're using VNC to connect to the system.
What I do, is pass my Logitech G35 headset to the VM or use the HDMI Audio from my 970.
You didn't mention if you are using qemu or virt-manager, so I going assume qemu since it is what I use.
I use the parameter -soundhw hda in qemu in order to windows to detect a intel high definition card.
I also use QEMU_AUDIO_DRV before the qemu command, since you use alsa you can use:
QEMU_ENV="QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=alsa QEMU_AUDIO_TIMER_PERIOD=0 qemu-system-x86_64 ...
QEMU_ENV="QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=alsa QEMU_ALSA_DAC_BUFFER_SIZE=4096 QEMU_ALSA_DAC_PERIOD_SIZE=0 qemu-system-x86_64 ...
You can use qemu-system-x86_64 -audio-help to know the current supported drivers and parameters.
If this didn't work or you are using virtmanager you can also:
Use the audio hdmi for you gpu (if you gpu as as one)
Pass pci soundcard and use it
Pass usb soundcard and use it (most common solution)
Using the latest version of virtmanager it will work. You have to enable the few options in the qemu.conf to allow host audio.
See here:
Hello all! I am Gray from GrayWolfTech. I make videos on Linux and other interesting technology. Wendell has given me permission to post my written guides here for my videos. This is great for two reasons: First it helps grow this community and second my videos reach a wider audience to share what I have learned. I look forward to posting all my guides and videos here, and I am more than happy to answer any questions about the guide you may have.
-- Onward! --
Now it’s time for one of the coolest and more advanced capabilities of Linux. KVM, or kernel virtual machines. We are going to go through step by step, how to setup PCI pass-through to a Windows virtual machine on a Debian host to play games!
Thanks to Redhat, KVM can run virtual machines with almost bare metal performance and supports a wide variety of other neat features. The one we are going to focus on in this video is of course, PCI pass-through. The process of allowing a virtual machine full access to a PCI express graphics card for gaming, CAD, or 3D rendering. With this neat capability, you can run Linux as your host OS, and then pass your GPU (or one of your GPUs if you have multiple) to a virtual machine to play games.
Let’s go over the requirements for this project:
First and most important, you should backup any data you have on your PC. If you know what you are doing then you will not lose anything, but accidentally selecting the wrong drive when installing can lead you to be very sad when you figure out the drive you wiped had all your really good porn on it. Second, this process will take time. For someone who is an experienced Linux user it should take about 20 minutes (not counting time to install Debian or recompile the kernel). For someone who is new it might take longer. Make sure you allow yourself an entire afternoon or a good chunk of 4-5 hours where you could potentially not have a working PC. Third, follow the instructions I lay out in the video. I will answer questions dow…