Windows is actually a pain in terms of drivers. Linux doesn't have many drivers that are not open source and in the kernel already, so that there is no additional driver installation required as with windows. Linux always works out of the box, even if you don't install a single driver. The purpose of installing graphics drivers in linux is to install proprietary, closed source graphics drivers. These are basically just the windows drivers, that are run in a kind of "realtime translation" mode, so that they work for linux. Intel has never had proprietary graphics drivers, all of their graphics drivers are open source, but nVidia and ATI have started with "windows-only" drivers to sell "optimization tickets". AMD is not really developing Catalyst much further, they are going for open source drivers like Intel because it makes sense for so many reasons, the most important being that the hardware that sets the standard in open source, sets the standard period, and AMD and Intel have a pretty equivalent vision on what graphics cards should be and how they should work.
It'll work, 'm pretty sure. And if your CPU or Motherboard happen/s to be having an IGP, you can even still SLI them in the virtual Windows system. Plus, NVidia drivers for Linux should work (not perfectly, but they're more or less stable and that's what you want, no?).
EDIT: okay, now that I've actually looked up your configuration... IGP is not an option, and you'll want to keep the multiple display config. You could try getting an AMD Radeon HD6670 with a DisplayPort port second hand, that should be able to drive all three displays by itself no problemo. Just make sure you plug the NVidia cards in on another input for the main gaming monitor and that you get an active DisplayPort adapter should your monitors not support it (which I doubt, but hey... that seems to be common with some US models, so I'd better warn you of it just in case).
Yes. I'm not sure if it does so on all chipsets, since there doesn't seem to be any proper information about that, but a 890FX or 990FX chipset should support IOMMU virtualization (which is what you're looking for when you want to do PCI passthrough).
EDIT: Crosshair V is 990FX. You'll be fine, just look if it's turned on in the BIOS and if PCI passthrough doesn't work, turn it off in the BIOS (AMD-Vi/AMD-V I mean) since I've heard of ASUS trying to sabotage the whole thing this way. As for what distro to use, use an easy derivative of a "hard" distro instead of Ubuntu, as it'll run faster and allow you to run several virtual OS's for increased security (since you've got an 8 core, that shouldn't be a problem performance wise). For the virtual OS's I guess OpenSUSE should do fine (I've heard it supports doing pretty much everything in GUI, which is a good thing). For the host, use Manjaro (Arch derivative) or something similar (I think it was called Sabayon for the Gentoo derivative). Just make sure the host is bleeding edge and uses a newer kernel than 3.12, as virtualization was improved significantly with it.
"on bare metal" = "host" = installed as an operating system on the hard drive(s) (utilises actual, real hardware)
"virtual" = "guest" = installed inside another operating system (utilises specified resources on the actual, real hardware; these resources and a lot of other parameters can easily be changed on a whim)
I'm having the exact same issue, and running the host in dom0/Xen mode isn't any better; Windows just bluescreens at boot.
When booting into normal mode I get following messages:
Booting 'Fedora, with Linux 3.12.7-300.fc20.x86_64'
0.000000] tsc: Fast TSC calibration failed
0.295487] [Firmware bug]: AMD-Vi: IOAPC[7] not in IVRS
0.295527] [Firmware bug]: AMD-Vi: IOAPC[8] not in IVRS
0.295564] [Firmware bug]: AMD-Vi: No southbridge IOAPIC
0.295602] AMD-Vi: Disabling interrupt mapping
Seems that the Sabertooth990fx r2 has issues with IVRS tables, and no BIOS updates are available. Someone made a DIY ROM to fix the issue, but I wouldn't recommend flashing your mobo with anything that aint from Asus.
I've mentioned this before on the forum, Asus always tries to sabotage the IOMMU functionality (ever since their 2009 "Runs better on Windows" deal with Microsoft that killed the netbook market), either by reversing the on/off settings in BIOS, or by not delivering a BIOS that enables IOMMU. But they have to, it's an AMD requirement, so they do provide one BIOS version that works, but they label it as "beta". So install the "beta" BIOS, and it will work. Best is to stay away from Asus products altogether, well, maybe not now that they don't make their motherboards themselves anymore, but it's always a BIOS update struggle. Best stick with AsRock, Gigabyte, MSI, it's cheaper and it just works. Asus makes kinda still sense in enterprise grade mobos, but there's definitely better out there also in that category, and they're not the cheapest enterprise grade boards any more either... well, Asus is having serious problems, they might not survive their lack of respect for their customers, but they still seen adamant on marketing useless consumer crap peripherals for a premium price, and seem to be preferring that over selling real products.
Nope, the link is in a small corner of the Asus site, I don't remember exactly, but it was either Asus Germany or Asus Taiwan. It also downloads very slowly, but it actually works.
Well apparently I had checked the available ROMs for the previous gen Sabertooth 990fx and not the r2 model like I was supposed to. Plus I found out that the IVRS issues had been fixed since BIOS version 2005 (last fall), so I went ahead and flashed the newest (2104) version on the mobo. Sure nuff the previous error messages I got at boot up doesn't appear any more, however there is no increase in windows' performance, it still has like only 64MB of VGA memory to its avail. Can't flash the 2005 version on the board either, since it's outdated...
Any idea on how to check if the gpu passthrough is working properly?
Edit: Does this require proprietary drivers? Iirc there was compatibility issues between proprietary ati drivers and gnome or wayland, so I just stuck to the open ones.
Edit2: Nvm, just read the first page of the thread again.
Well, if you have MB of VRAM, then that says it all I would think.
You have to bind the PCI slot of the graphics card you want to use in Windows to the Windows virtual box. Then use the Windows drivers like you would in a Windows bare metal install.
Could you do the opposite of what you gave as an example. Say I have an octo-core and KSP is a single threaded application. Could I emulate a single core possessor and have better performance/more utilization of my cpu?
Nope. Because KSP is not made to actually utilise multiple cores (as in, having multiple things run side by side in the program instead of one after another), giving Windows a single core CPU will not help. Quite the opposite, since Windows has to actually use some system resources too, it'll be a lot slower.
but i cant use the video card i use as the primary card on linux do i?
if i try to add the graphics card as a pci device (in the pci host devices menu) the machine crashes and the graphics on my host restarts. is there a chance this would work with a amd card that way or is the asus mainboard the problem here?