Oh hey, a place for me to brag about relevant things.
So my first VFIO machine was
-Threadripper 3975WX
-Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI
-512 Gb RAM
-Several USB cards, one per VM.
Over a year it accumulated a couple of GPUs
-ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT Phantom Gaming D 16G OC
-Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 TURBO 24G
Everything got watercooled eventually.
Don’t have any good finished product pictures, here are a couple of in-progress ones.
It also had a bunch of other stuff coming and going over time, like Xeon Phi card, a 1070 Ti GPU, the 4x nvme card.
Naturally, this wasn’t built all at once and was slowly put together over about a year.
The AMD GPU came first, and it took some shenanigans to get it to pass through and get it to work.
First time around i used it for a Windows gaming VM, but it didn’t last all that long in it and started freezing up and crashing a few months in. So it was relegated to a Linux VM, where it worked flawlessly ever since, and the gaming VM switched to a recently acquired 3090.
3090 worked with passthrough like a charm out of the box with no shenanigans required other than passing both subdevices of it in a correct topology, and figuring out that it won’t work in the top slot.
Well, some shenanigans were required i guess.
It was mainly used for gaming VM and occasionally for ML stuff in a Linux VM.
Through the power of long wires and an HDBaseT USB/HDMI over ethernet cable extender, this machine got split into several stations and/or monitors around the house.
The main station (back to the wall, so hard to take a picture of).
The cozy station under the bed, with RGB and stuff.
All in all, this was my pandemic project, when i sat at home with much income and not a lot to use it on.
As pandemic was coming to a close (or rather a no-one-cares-about-it-any-more-se), this abruptly came to an end.
Shit happened, i moved to another country, and most of this stuff got left behind and eventually auctioned off or reused elsewhere.
Nowadays i got another setup:
-Ryzen 5950x
-ASUS ROG STRIX X570-I GAMING
-64 Gb of RAM
-Dan A4 case (yes, the CPU is TDP limited in the BIOS)
-Gigabyte 3070 eagle (upgraded from Palit GTX 1070 Ti Dual, which moved to an eGPU enclosure)
Don’t remember having any new issues setting it up, it all just worked.
Used in about the same way, since i continue to dislike the idea of letting windows bareback any real hardware and like the simplicity of having setups in VMs.
Practically the only change is that it’s a single station, single primary VM at a time setup. I need to “reboot” to switch from work VM to gaming VM or back.
An interesting problem with thit setup was that it’s in the same room i sleep in (the other one was in it’s own ventilated and soundproofed closet), and i don’t like shutting down the work VM since that loses state. So i tried, and succeeded, in making a VM hibernate.
Which is rather convenient. I can either power down the host afterwards, or even boot another VM in it’s place without any usual fears associated with hibernation and dual boot.
So yeah. I do look forward to this way of using computers becoming easier and more common. Splitting one GPU between several VMs would have been nice. Double nice if you can assign half of the card’s ports to one and the other half to the other.
Oh, and i use Arch on everything that’s not the win10 gaming VM, btw.