#7 KVM/QEMU GPU Passthrough
Opened 2 years ago by glb. Modified 2 years ago

Original proposal:

This would be a pretty interesting sequel to the article about virtualization system on fedora workstation.
The purpose of this article would be to describe what GPU Passthrough is and how someone can set it up to use a physical graphic card inside a VM. The article would aim to educate the user about two things: what and how. Since people often find themselves forced to reboot on windows to use some GPU features that painfully available on Linux systems in general and fedora in particular, GPU passthrough is a great emulation technique which direct benefit is to use fedora as a daily driver without rebooting to, let's say windows (nothing personal). I would really like to propose a flow but not being an expert myself I leave it to your more experienced hands :)

Helpful resources:

https://qubitrenegade.com/virtualization/kvm/vfio/2019/07/17/VFIO-Fedora-Notes.html


Metadata Update from @glb:
- Issue tagged with: article

2 years ago

Gregory Lee Bartholomew 02 Sep 2021 16:49

This appears to have been proposed by *rmpr (Mairo Paul Rufus)

Dropping my two cents as I experimented with VFIO passthrough this year.

I used these resources to get everything up and running via Virt-Manager:
https://github.com/ekistece/Fedora-33-VFIO-guide
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
https://stty.io/2018/07/27/running-windows-with-pci-passthrough-on-gentoo-linux/

Gotchas, findings (apart from the already pointed out things in all the articles):
- Correct Dracut config is important for vfio to get the GPU loaded into VFIO correctly
- Running the guest VM off a dedicated HDD / SSD oppose to virtual disk image like qcow2 makes a very noticable performance difference
- It's important for your HW to be capable of supporting two GPUs - for me on an all-AMD system I discovered that my motherboard can't simultaniously support two PCI-E x16 at the same time, despite sufficient power supply (individual motherboard manual has to be studied before attempting VFIO pass-through!)

Thanks for the info @karlisk!

Metadata Update from @glb:
- Issue assigned to rmpr

2 years ago

Mario Paulo Rufus

Close, it's Mairo Paul Rufus

Sorry about that. I've made the correction. 🙂

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