Want to do a GPU pass through to run a few games, recommended guides?

Software & Operating Systems VFIO
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Hi,

I am looking to go completely windows free and I want to be able to do a GPU pass through with my spare GPU I have put in my system. The games I want to run won’t be too demanding. I have had a look for guides and there are so many I can’t choose. Is there any guides that anyone recommends for someone not too familiar with virtualisation but willing to learn.

edit: running Manjaro 18.0.4

Thanks

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Most of the guides are fairly specific to a Linux distribution. So if you could let us know what distro you want to use?

Also, I moved your post to the correct vfio category.

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Yeah, Should have said that in the OP, Manjaro 18.0.4

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For Manjaro, I would recommend using the Arch wiki page on passthrough-
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

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What games? Have you looked to see if there is acceptable performance from Wine/Proton/Steam Play? I don’t play stuff too terribly demanding and definitely no AAA newer titles, so I have been pretty happy just playing whatever works and sticking heavily to native Linux.

Not that you can’t do pass through, but if you don’t need it then it seems like it would be easier to see if something like Steam Play, Play On Linux, or Lutris would be an easier option. That goes double if you want to upgrade often or distro hop.

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Well one that comes to mind is Morrowind, I know openMW is a thing but I want to be able to continue a save I started on vanilla morrowind as they aren’t transferable.

Another big reason is because of at my college, A large part of my studies for networking is windows and Microsoft based. Also I think a project would be good to have.

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Despite it dating back to 2015, I still find Alex Williamson’s blog series a great resource for VFIO in addition to the Arch wiki.

It does assume usage of dracut for initramfs, a RPM based distribution, virt-manager, static huge pages and an already sane apparmor or selinux config but is written in a step-by-step manner which hopefully you can map to other distributions. Should help at the very least in digesting other guides and wikis.

Be warned it is missing information on pretty much all recent developments I.E. Q35 maturity, PCIe lane speed setting and recent AMD/Nvidia quirks, so I’d treat it as a general introduction only unless you’re starting out with an i440fx platform.