First of all thank you for anyone who takes the time to read this or suggest any changes that might be beneficial. I am relatively new to this and jumped head first and I am finding it is quite a rabbit hole.
My end state is that I am able to use my windows 10vm and Pop_OS at the same time on two different monitors with one keyboard. I understand that this sounds simple enough. I have installed looking glass and have gotten everything to work…mostly. One issue I am having is looking glass will only open up in full screen on my smaller monitor(I understand this is probably due to my own unfamiliarity with the software, hence the ask for help).
So here are my setup specs and things I have tried.
CPU: Ryzen 5900x host-passthrough to vm
Motherboard: Aorus Master X570
Memory: 32gbs of 3600 cl 16 (16gbs passed to win10 guest)
GPU1: Nvidia 3090 FE passed to win10 guest
GPU2: AMD 6800xt Midnight edition host gpu
NVME: 1 x Sabrent pcie 4.0 for pop_os host
2 x Western Digital pcie 3.0 passed to windows10 guest
PSU: Be Quiet 850w Platinum
Main Monitor: Dell AW3418DW has one hdmi 1.4 port and one display port 1.2 (HDMI only able to push 60hz)
Secondary Monitor(mounted above main): Spectre 24in 1080p with 1 display port, 1 hdmi 1.4, 1 hdmi 2.0.
To be clear everything “works” I can plug my main monitor into the 3090 and since that is the card passed through to the guest it works beautifully. I have three issues with this: For one the inconvenience of having to switch inputs on the monitor. I understand this is minor but this is an almost no compromise system. Threadripper would be awesome for the pcie lanes but that’s for the future I suppose. The second issue is that I still want the 120hz performance on my main monitor while using Linux. With this setup I am limited to 60hz because of the hdmi 1.4 port. The final issue is that I have to pass my single keyboard and mouse to the vm and loose functionality inside of the host.
Another setup I tried which is the closest I’ve gotten to what I’m looking for is looking glass. The issue I’m having with this is I cant seem to have looking glass start on the main monitor in full screen. It wants to use the secondary monitor every time. Also I have played around with the inputs on each graphics card of the past couple days with no real results.
I would like input from the community on how to best remedy this issue? I’m open to almost all suggestions including getting a monitor with better I/O support and making my primary my secondary.
Another question I had was about CPU pinning. The vm performs awesome in gaming, but there have been some issues with stability and I believe it is because I have not pinned the CPUs. I was looking for advice on what would be the best performance for the windows 10 vm as while that’s running I wont be doing anything too intensive on the linux host.
Once again thank you for your time and suggestions in advance, and I apologize if this is too long or too short. I never know what’s best in a forum post, LOL!!
I can also post my xml for anyone who thinks it would be useful.
