GPU Pass-Through - VFIO - Let's run all the GPUs together!

[@Level1Linux]

We're doing a VFIO PC giveaway!! Main Channel Video Here +kzbin.info/www/bejne/gXLdiKB3aZVki5o Enter on the forum! + forum.level1techs.com/t/vfio-passthrough-in-2023-call-to-arms/199671

[@BBWahoo]

Should've beaten linus with a shovel at LTX when you had the chance

[@marcogenovesi8570]

At the present day, the biggest threat to VFIO is the lack of affordable boards and hardware with multiple PCIe slots. Heck even a full-atx board with two whole x16 slots is expensive

[@CMDRSweeper]

The reason my storage machines are built on old platforms these days... I need as many PCI-E lanes as possible for storage controllers.

[@donoteatmikezila]

Not to mention the pitfall of many, many board having multiple x16 slots, but only the top slot is actually x16 and the rest are x4.

[@Fractal_32]

Buy used or old hardware for cheaper than the new hardware. (Old EPYC or Threadripper chips would be great for a workstation, if you do buy EPYC chips make sure to know what board they came from since they have Efuses for being locked into a motherboard venders board.)

[@Mpdarkguy]

@@donoteatmikezilaor the second slot is way too close and you would be sandwiching the gpu fans to whatever is the second card you’re attaching

[@AthanImmortal]

@@donoteatmikezila Or a 16x slot that's 4x, except if you put anything in the adjoining 1x then it's 1x etc. A lot of the AM4 platforms had this to the point I wondered what the point of a full ATX was.

[@T19R0N]

LEVEL ONE LINUX!!!

[@applicablerobot]

Lol, I was just going to post this. Always a good day when a new L1L video is released

[@seantraynor]

Love to know more about the A770 SR-IOV! Sounds like a cross flash to the Flex 170 BIOS.

[@NPzed]

I would love to see the day where I can full time a baremetal hypervisor and/or Linux system and still be able to run the Windows only apps like Adobe for my photography workflow, some games, and other workflows as discovered. I hope VFIO can allow that functionality at some point! Thanks for the awesome video and pursuing this awesome tech!

[@Stephen-yk5ik]

VFIO is such a great concept it really is a shame there really isnt more enthusiast level support from manufacturers. Especially with the rise of virtualization and its permeation into the enthusiast and regular office space. Hell I know smaller companies who are running all of their systems in virtualized environments with docker and kubernetes

[@jeziel675]

Really appreciate the work you put into fostering the community behind VFIO and virtualization and passthrough. You exemplify what great open-source can do.

[@sheldonkupa9120]

So awesome he tries to restart the hype! Make vfio great again, well done Wendell👍👏🍾

[@danksagrabowski2438]

I'm personally using VFIO! Running Arch Linux as a host with an Intel A380 GPU and an RTX 4070 for my Windows guest to play games via Looking Glass. I've been using this setup (apart from some GPU upgrades) since about 2 and a half years now. Thoroughly enjoying it!

[@OmegaMadMaxFusion]

Some things happened. I can't fault Wendell for not having time for this. I'm glad he's able to work on this more now. I've had limited success with VFIO on my rig and I also want support and enthusiasm for it to grow.

[@bartios]

Thanks for all the work you're doing on VFIO Wendell!

[@andre-le-bone-aparte]

Not Just Games.... Using multiple macOS Xcode Versions to support development on older iOS hardware, and having multiple GPUs for each guest OS is pretty cool for software developers!

[@9768236]

Wrote my story on the forum. Thanks for bringing VFIO back up again to the masses, Wendell. Here's to hoping AMD can start troubleshooting the reset bug and all of the vendors embracing SR-IOV.

[@angiebueno9303]

At last your back on this channel!🎉 Despite the daily show I was entering in depression... And I was eagerly waiting for deeper vfio content. Thank you.

[@Fractal_32]

VFIO has been fun when I used it. The only reason I don’t currently use it is because the games I want to run get angry over running in a virtual machine. Thank you so much for all the hard work that went into making VFIO.

[@LeminskiTankscor]

I did on my old machine for Windows 10, so I could easily play in VR. I've since abandoned Windows entirely, but I'm still interested in VFIO, especially if I go home lab gaming machine later. P.S. Love that you are covering this

[@no.no.4680]

Has VR on Linux improved?

[@FakeMichau]

So you are running VR under Linux? How does it work?

[@LeminskiTankscor]

@@FakeMichau I'm using ALVR on my Quest 1. Takes a bit of work, and I'm not going to pretend it's easier, but it's a wireless solution that let's me skip Windows entirely and play H3VR quite well.

[@the_beefy1986]

I currently run 2 previous gen GPUs in my system (one for Linux and the other for a Windows VM). I might consider shelling out more for a single current gen GPU if I could use it under both OSes simultaneously.

[@solidreactor]

My dream is to move to Linux and still be able to use some of my Windows only applications (and games). One of these applications for the moment is ROCm and PyTorch support that is in Linux only. About the composable infrastructure, hardware "as a software service" that do indeed look very very interesting and would like to take that as the next step after VFIO.

[@gudenau]

I really want SP-IOV support on consumer GPUs, there are some really janky stuff that could be cool that would only work under that.

[@tylerbarr2740]

This has to be the future Im keeping my on the open-iov project from archcompute

[@sheldonkupa9120]

Good to see gpu passthrough a topic again👏👍 I do a lot of gpu passthrough (for science😉), also single gpu passthrough, also with igpus. I use proxmox, and honestly the most issues i have is that with new kernels and upgrades things have changed without good documentation. Just to mention amd agesa breaking everything😣 When passthrough breaks that means a lot of google fu. I wish mediated device passthrough would be cheap and available at consumer level😪

[@no.no.4680]

I’m glad there’s a new thread for 2023 because I had to sort through a bunch of old and sometimes conflicting info, which ultimately led to me putting off this project for many months.

[@Putzpie4U]

Once I got a home server setup with some virtual machines I realized the magic to be had lol. Thank you for your work wendell.

[@jcugnoni]

Love VFIO! I have it setup on my Linux workstation to run a Windows desktop in paralel (second screen). It is a now venerable dual Xeon E5-2670 128gb ram but still a solid and very stable platform. The Linux side is running mostly simulation software (CAE: Salome-Meca/Code-Aster, OpenFOAM) and scientific computing while the Windows VM runs Office and Solidworks (with pretty good HW acceleration via VFIO). I have a GTX 1060 6Gb for the Linux side and pass through a GTX 970 4Gb to the windows VM. The only challenge was that NVidia drivers in Windows were not initializing properly. There was a fix; but I heard that now it works out of the box. Anyway, I really encourage everyone with a good knowledge of Linux to do that to run Windows with great graphics performance.

[@SpeikobraRote]

Honestly Im just here cause the video got recommended to me in my feed but now I learned more than I did before clicking the video. Thanks for that.

[@bobruddy]

yes. Commented in your other post, but due to inspiration from you been running a 3955WX with a 6600XT, 2x P4000, and a P40. For multiple desktops and ML testing. My daily driver. Its been working great. Took me a while to find video cards that worked out of the box, but once I got it dialed in its been rock solid.

[@MaroltG]

Yes yes vfio is my baby. I use it on my proxmox host, passing gpu to windows and osx using rtx 6600xt. I also have most of my applications virtualized. It is like having multiple computers, but you just have one beefy workstation instead. 👍

[@sheldonkupa9120]

Wait, is 6600xt working with OSX?? I am stuck with rx570. And yes, proxmox ist the most awesome OS to passthrough, so cool!

[@hydroponicgard]

I'm glad to see VFIO being covered. It'll be fun to see what I can do when I get FW16 w/ 7700S and external GPU... What kind of madness can I pull off, is the question >:D

[@MisterOutofTime]

Hope we gettkng better vgpu /sr-iov suppoet on desktop gpus in future,the experience of using vgpu unlocker/patcher for the 2080ti on nixos was atleast really painless and fun to use, love the concept very much, would use a lot more if i could upgrade my gpu to a top spec amd /nvidia and have these features ...

[@brandonphilander661]

Can't wait for bhyve to mature and have hardware accelerated GPU passthrough on FreeBSD.

[@starlightatdusk4896]

Have used VFIO in the past, works like a charm. These days I'm more focused on gaming in Linux itself. Looking to set up VFIO/Windows for those few games that I can't get to work in Linux. Many thanks to you, @gnif, and all others for your hard work on getting all this to work.

[@TheFlatronify]

For us we use VFIO for years now with a Nvidia 2080 SUPER + AMD RX6900 XT on a AMD Ryzen 7 3800X to run two PCs in one for work + gaming. "Two gamers one CPU" works flawless for years now. This technology allows to much more efficiently use the hardware and abstract the hardware from the OS (Windows 11 / Fedora 39 / Proxmox PVE).

[@jonathanisom]

I think the future will be programs like web browsers,etc that run in mini-VMs that are isolated from the rest of the OS, but looks like they are running natively on the host for most consumers automatically.

[@richdemars9302]

Already using it, my daughter is on the COD dev team and I built her a PC the run RichARCH installed Arch with VFIO to run Windoze in a VM with its own Nvidia GPU.

[@kingyachan]

Definitely checking out that cubes project, thanks for the recommendation!

[@PioneerAxon]

I remember setting up VFIO on my first self-assembled desktop around 8 years ago. I have a 1070 and 1050TI. Both are set up as pass-throughs from the host. I used to use the 1070 for windows VM to play games without letting windows touch my host. I also had a Pop OS VM sharing the same GPU to play games that supported Linux. I could boot only one at a time, but for gaming that's not an issue. I always wished that Nvidia and AMD would support SR IOV by the time I would have to build a new system. But that's still a dream after 8 years! Nowadays, with the Steam Deck and the proton improvements by Valve, I no longer boot up the gaming VMs. 😅

[@DieMiinz]

I've been using VFIO to play games for around 2 years. Before that I would dual-boot Linux and Windows, but I never liked dual-booting because it would cause me to use Windows most of the time out of laziness. I started with a GTX 970 in the host and an RX 6700 XT in the guest, then moved the 6700 to the host with an RTX 3080 in the guest. I also pass a network adapter, an SSD, a Bluetooth controller, and a USB hub for my mouse/keyboard. Overall it has been a great experience, but I have run into a few popular games that do not work due to anti-cheat garbage. Some examples are Valorant and Phantasy Star Online. One game I actually care about that gave me trouble was Elden Ring (it worked normally for like 6 months and then a patch made it start complaining about VMs), but I managed to get past the error by tweaking some settings in virt-manager.

[@ArchaeanDragon]

From March to June, I spent 3 months trying to do a HV upgrade I had been planning and researching for several years now. I picked Xen as my hypervisor and Linux as my dom0 host, with the plan to run Win10 Pro as my guest. I spent most of that time trying to get passthrough to work, and just couldn't get it done. Some of it was hardware-related, but most of it was Linux kernel and qemu UEFI bios issues. Eventually, I tried Qubes OS, and I finally got it working. I've been using it now for several months, and it is pretty stable. Still have some minor performance issues, and trying to get a working KM switch has been a nightmare.

[@velho6298]

Really cool to see the project! Looking glass made some great efforts forward

[@PakoSt]

SR-IOV support by Intel consumer GPUs - this makes the Intel offerings veeery tempting despite early adopter/ 1st gen hardware/ mod requirements/ lower performance worries. Is the same mod available for A750?

[@MarkDStroyer]

Ooh, hearing the Looking Glass thing out loud, that actually does sound really cool

[@jamescrook99]

Always a good day when there is a new level one Linux vid !

[@kortaffel]

What bothers me the most in recent years is a lack of PCIe lanes and slots on the motherboard. I have one slot for a graphics card and on x1 or x4 at the bottom. That's not enough if you have - Capture card - Sound card - Tv Tuner - Modem for your asterix pbx - 10 gig network card And actually use your PC for more than just a facebook machine

[@bosstowndynamics5488]

In a pinch, capture card, sound card and TV tuner can all easily be USB. Not sure about the PBX hardware but there's probably options there as well. Plus, there's more M.2 slots on modern systems and each of those is effectively a weird looking x4 PCIe slot with the right adaptor - pick the right motherboard these days and while it's more of a pain with all the adaptors you can actually get more medium speed PCIe slots than older consumer systems, so long as you only need one slot with more than x8 lanes.

[@iKJHXBL]

lucky for you my vfio server is almost fully set up :D just need to finish the watercooling loop

[@eldizo_]

That A770 mod sounds nice, the things we could have but have no control over... Still just dualbooting, the only thing holding me back is getting a second GPU with similar performance cause I like doing stuff on both systems.

[@CTWilliams89]

I love vfio and have a 3090 for pass through. Watching your video gave me an idea as I was working on some terraform and packer for proxmox. It would be super awesome to be able to use those tools and set up a vfio workstation with them. Something I may have to look into more tomorrow! I'm thinking probably vagrant would be a good starting point.

[@johanngambolputty5351]

I bought one of those small old cards just to try to do pass-through with, but ended up not bothering, seemed a lot easier to just avoid any non-wineable windows software altogether. As a curiosity, supposing a piece of software doesn't need to somehow access hardware more directly, suppose it just needs to talk to opengl, can you have a guest driver that just forwards calls to the host driver (and forwards back results)?

[@daveg4417]

I have been using VM's for well over a decade now, I use them to run older versions of Windows with software that I either wanted to sandbox or that only ran on that older OS. I also use VM's to keep my main Windows OS drive clean, instead of installing dozens of apps onto the OS drive, I will run a lot of my software in VM's. System upgrades and new OS's means that I simply have to copy the VM to the new computer. I haven't gotten into VFIO though, but it does sound useful.

[@ZMOT7S]

Always a good day when a level 1 Linux video pops up!

[@johnpaulsen1849]

I love your work. My unRAID is running dual GPU and USB controller passthrough. My son uses one of these vms daily. Also, uses zfs and deduplication. Games are large and having two copies taking up disk space sucks. Any hope of this working like the windows hyperV paravirtualization in the near future?

[@wezzy1983]

I'm messing around with GPU partitioning, working really well

[@joshua_lee732]

Always a good day when this channel pops up again :)

[@ClintTheriault]

I use VFIO basically every day. My main rig is a Ryzen 5700g with a RX 5700 XT in a VM. But it has a bad reset bug where I need to reboot the entire system when I want to boot the VM. I also have a couple of Intel X99 systems using XCP-NG and 10 series nvidia gpus and those have zero reset issues. Those are great for stuff like Plex and other random things to play with. Also I had to disable RE-BAR in order or any passthrough to work properly.

[@Cynyr]

Vfio is great, I'm passing some network cards through to a guest for a forbidden router. What we need though is basically everything to support sr-iov, in particular gpus, but nics, and ssds too. Again all on consumer grade hardware. Also, with everything going pcie, it sure would be nice to get more than 24 lanes on a consumer cpu.

[@rustyroy5385]

AFAIK anything PCIe can be passed through. Writing this now from a VM that has the SSD passed through, and on consumer hardware. Definitely agree with the need for more lanes, though ability to share a device between the host and multiple VMs would reduce this need.

[@xPakrikx]

for network stuff i use OvS + DPDK or VPP + DPKD + plugins for controll plane. But sr-iov can be used too

[@iamnotyourmate]

I use it each and every day i have an rx 570 for guest and gt 710 to host

[@chadmckean9026]

I do use VFIO, that said i would probably use it more if i should access the hardware from both the host and the guest at the same time. I have a old dual port PICe x4 gigabit Intel NIC (82571EB) passed to my pfsense VM (the forbidden router) AMD Ryzen 3 2200GE / MSI B450M Gaming Plus (BIOS: 7B87v16)

[@szaszm_]

I'm occasionally using VFIO for a gaming Windows VM on Linux, less and less often over time as gaming gets better on Linux. Threadripper 3970X (plenty of PCIe), 6700XT host GPU, GTX 1650 for guest. I ran into some issues with looking glass in the past that I didn't bother debugging.

[@J0ermungand]

I still love my VFIO gaming setup. I only upgraded the Windows Guest GPU from a 1080Ti to a 6800XT recently and kept the 5700XT for the Manjaro host. IT would be awesome if guest and host could share a GPU in the same way they share the CPU. I wonder if stuff like resizable BAR would work as well then.

[@EnvAdam]

i use linux as a main OS but not all software works well under wine or i dont feel like faffing with it so being able to attatch a GPU to a VM and boot it up with proper acceleration in lets say fusion360 is great.

[@jtj11251994]

I'm excited about what's to come!

[@kinirogue]

I’ve been wanting to get into this since ~2016. Tried it once not much success. But it is an exciting tech!

[@tubasweb]

I rarely comment, but this is the type of video we need! Keel up the virtualization how-to's 🎉

[@joshua_lee732]

Hmm Im curious about this as Ive never really considered doing anything like you mentioned before.

[@cainzjussYT]

Many years ago i wanted to run daily linux and have windows as a VM just for gaming and some apps that are not native to linux. Back then i could not figure it out. Maybe it was because i just had 1 GPU and i wanted to share it between the host and the guest. Today as i still have the same dream but have far less time available to jump thru hoops. Installing a new OS and getting it set up the way i want it will take months on its own. The way i see it...bios settings aside. If there is no handcrafting needed to be done by the end user to get VFIO working (maybe a plugin install to virtualbox or some VM software). I'm sure even i would have a go with my limited time.

[@donoteatmikezila]

I enjoy VFIO and feel like it's a great solution...so long as you don't play any games that rely on anti-cheat. There are lots of games that cannot run under VFIO. Tarkov, Siege, Star Rail, Genshin, VR Chat, Valorant, etc, etc. If you don't play online games you probably won't run into any trouble, but if you do, you'll hit headaches real quick. That said, when it does work, it's magic. Quick tip I have is to grab a cheap USB3 card which you can pass along to your gaming VM. No fuss with software passing of software USB devices and EZ sound solution via any USB headset. I haven't been able to get looking-glass working well no matter what combination of configuration I use. I pass a 3080 Ti to the guest and try to use an intel igpu for the host and the looking-class client is choppy and laggy. I get told that Intel iGPUs are no good for this, something about the ring0 bus being too slow. Ok. I instead use a Radeon Pro WX 2100, which performs just as poorly. I get told that's too slow. I use a Nvidia 1050 Ti, which works *marginally* better, but still not smooth at 1080p 60, with anything higher than 60fps or 1080p being unusable. I dunno what the issue was. It worked fine to do the little demo with it everyone always does where you have a directly connected monitor at a tiny look-glass window and you see they're in perfect sync, but when you actually blow up the looking-glass window to full size and try to play a game at 1440p 120fps the whole thing just falls over. It was much easier and more reliable to just use sunshine and moonlight and lean on the cards video encoders.

[@mathyoooo2]

7:30 yes, I've been using VFIO for a couple years now! But recently I've upgraded from am4 to am5 and so far my experience regarding VFIO has been worse on the newer plattform...

[@erk5243]

once upon a time i went down the windows GPU pass thru rabbit hole and spent weeks and weeks lost, trying everything i could find and nothing f@%#!$ worked. I thought this was impossible, I now know its because Nvidia hates me and I didnt know L1 was pushing this tech. this makes me happy!

[@jasonnykamp6173]

Looking glass sounds fantastic!

[@zekicay]

I use VFIO to virtualize a router VM - pass through the LAN cards to it, then another for a NAS - pass through the SATA controllers and NVME drives, and another for HTPC - pass through input and iGPU. I would like to have SR-IOV but consumer cards don't support it - it's a shame.

[@jasontti]

Thank you, for putting vfio on my radar. Currently living the dream of having linux host, but still be able to do my job as game tester and high end gaming without having 2 separate boxes. 🎉

[@benjaminoechsli1941]

"Wendell calls for aid!" "And the community will answer!" Let's do this. 😎

[@xValkyrie93]

Just started my Linux journey 2 days ago. Dual booting literally worked for 1 boot.... Now Im stuck with Linux. I cant even open the bios. So Im trying to solve my issues with some Virtual Machines, Apple, Windows etc to solve some of my issues with certain applications. I was up until midnight trying to work out why the Virtual Machine was so slow. Found out that you need something called IOMMU to enable GPU passthrough. And then this video magically appears the next morning in my youtube feed. I have seen some L1 Linux videos before. However this one I hadnt seen. Very aptly timed though.

[@ddangelobr]

Building my system with kind of same specs as yours, Asus x670Creator + 7950x + 64GB DDR5 6kMTs + Two AMD rx5700xt for the vms, will upgrade vga in the future, proxmox route 🤞🏻🤞🏻

[@knightwolf8877]

Oh my god yes I've been talking about this for years!

[@gorgonbert]

0:45 the poor keyboard buried under the boxes 🥺

[@thund3rduck]

I would love to use this full time. Linus’ multi-user gaming setup has always intrigued me. I overbuilt my AM4 build a couple years ago to setup 2 or 3 users per box. Unfortunately, I ran into tuning issues with Windows 10 and even more issues with Windows 11 when trying to use them as gaming VMs. I did successfully run Halo Infinite and beat the campaign on Legendary. VR performance was garbage though. Everything was just so very inconsistent. Love to get this working again.

[@kienanvella]

I do have VFIO running, but it's on a supermicro x10dri board that supports all the fancy features. I'd love to have a more efficient (more consumer-y) platform to do vfio on, but there's nothing in the consumer space with enough pcie lanes for my use case.

[@TrevHolland]

I have been using VFIO on my server rack for VMs and whatnot. I would LOVE to have a second GPU in my main PC so I can go back to daily driving Linux and just have a solid Windows VM.

[@thephantomchannel5368]

I held onto my X58 system well past its prime specifically for the extra pcie slots. Even back then the mainstream boards had more expansion slots than they do now despite the lanes being limited. It was my understanding that the idea of intel optane and windows 11 would allow for increased I/O and better latency as well as being able to access mismatched video cards without the need to be tethered with SLI as it was supposed to communicate seamlessly over pcie. To me this seems like it was moving towards a system which would make the concept of direct storage that much more beneficial. I don't get why mainstream boards now only have a few slots to work with and there always seems to be an asterisk with limitations.

[@linuxwithzach5338]

hey @Level1Linux I use VFIO on the daily, although, it's a 5700G, with a Nvidia quadro a2000. The quadro is used to pass through to the vm, I will admit that the setup had a bit of a "learning curve". I run Kubuntu 23.04 with QEMU/virt manager as the hypervisor, and I can say that virtualization is a really good way to get the most out of your hardware. what doesn't work well: USB pass-through is a bit of a headache, it's better to add the hardware (eg. microphone} directly to the VM, rather then try to pass the usb through. with pass-through, I have noticed certain functionalities degrade or fail with time, or the device will just decide that it does't want to be a part of the vm anymore. ;(

[@MrTubeuser12]

I've been using VFIO for a few years and seems to be working OK, my system is a bit old though. ( supermicro w/s board-X8DAH+-F, dual 6 core xeons-X5690's, 48 GB ram, couple of old AMD GPU's + onboard video and a SAS controller running SAS 3 HDD's for the vm's + a SATA ssd for the Linux host ) it's getting a bit long in the tooth but chugs along, it's a shame more consumer grade hardware doesn't make this more affordable.

[@Gastell0]

I have a server with EPYC 7551, Instinct Mi25 and Radeon Pro Duo Polaris, so not sure that'll be of any help, I was able to use HoloISO (SteamOS 3) to play games, though performance was quite bad, probably due to VM CPU settings

[@AI-xi4jk]

I use vfio on Proxmox. Would be great if Proxmox would have support for GPU pass through in the UI. Have to edit grub and such but at least documentation is pretty clear. Unfortunately you have to pay for vGPU if you want to split the GPU.

[@jvsimic]

Yes, I would absolutely benefit from VFIO. I can't currently use it because I run a RTX 2060 KO. Wanting to upgrade to a 7800 (XT?) GPU for Christmas. My use-case is me using windows VMs for work and student stuff where I can't have multiple CAD software installed such as AutoCAD LT for work while I require Autodesk Inventor for school on a student license. Running a SFF PC so I can't just buy a small workstation GPU and plug it in on an extra slot.

[@eamonnmccallum2282]

Wow , classic Vid love this kinda content

[@Netist_]

VFIO is great, but like some other people have mentioned in the comments, the biggest hurdle for me isn't even software necessarily (though I also desperately wish consumer- or hobbyist-grade SR-IOV was a thing), the problem is motherboards and cases. Getting a mobo with full lanes on multiple slots can be hard. Getting a mobo that can actually fit 2 full-size current-generation GPUs is also hard. Getting that to fit in a case is *also* hard. Ever since SLI went out of a fashion, it seems like this is a configuration that no one is really interested in supporting.

[@r0bo11]

Probably why the older generation boards like the X99's and earlier gen GPU's that aren't too power intensive are more popular, which can better support older architectures is why VFIO will always be on the enthusiast/hobbyist level. The hardest pill to swallow is the pricing of trying to configure a VFIO scenario that is more than just a hobbyist solution and most times bare metal is good enough for 99% of peoples needs. Interestingly Intel moving away from NUCs suggests that even the small PC market isn't doing well because of the lack of GPU oomph that most desire for gaming and higher processing tasks. But you're 100% right when it comes to the motherboard, then GPU and then PC case to fit all this technology into can lead to cost blow outs, not to mention how electricity prices have skyrocketed in most parts of the world. It becomes more of a nice-to-do instead of a must-have for many people.

[@SeithonJetter]

I mean... the most obvious thing is that you will be able to have "fresh" tuned and dedicated virtual machine OS's for each and every game, in theory. So if you have a game that runs best on driver X and another that works well on driver Y, then you can just do that :)

[@ciscocomputertech]

Back when the mining boom was all the rage I managed to scoop up 3070 2 x 6600xt 2070 super and a 1660 I wanted to VFIO my machine that had the 2 6600xts and the 1660 so that I was passing through the 6600xts to a mining vm and the 1660. And I would run everything on a Intel integrated GPU for my actual machines. It never happened due to complexity of project. Would LOVE to test stuff like this now

[@arkratos3727]

I used to use VFIO but then I had to reinstall my primary OS and haven't had time to set it back up because I feel like the steps to do it each time changes. I want to and honestly need to get it working again so I can do CAD work for my hobbies.

[@wileysneak]

been running vfio on x99 for a while and it still works great to this day

[@vinkuu]

I tried to use VFIO using TUF 3-RX5700XT-O8G-GAMING GPU with three different architectures, but was never able to get it working reliably. The architectures were EPYC (Asus MB, don't remember the model), same EPYC CPY (Supermicro MB, don't remember the model) and Ryzen 5950 CPU (ProArt X570-CREATOR WIFI).

[@schneider1112]

My Asrock B760M PG Riptide unfortunately has every single USB port put in the same IOMMU group. Rear ports, front ports, USB2.0, USB3.0, USB type A and type C, they are all in the same group. The rest seems fine in regards to the M.2 slots and PCI-e, I think. I will try adding extra USB ports to the lone X1 port, but I'm not yet sure if it has its own group.

[@BrotherGabe777]

If I run 3 separate gpus on my h11ssl-1 / epyc 7551p should I use crossfire or run them separately? XFX Radeon RX 580 GTS XXX Edition 1386MHz OC+, 8GB to be exact.

[@haxwithaxe]

I use VFIO frequently. Just for gaming so far. I've used it with a 1650s and now a 3070. I've had almost no problems. Edit: I also used it to pass through an HBA to run virtual truenas but the performance of running a whole OS just to manage ZFS wasn't worth it.

[@r0bo11]

I've been holding onto hope from afar when it comes to things in the Open Source community for stuff like LibVFIO, VirGL and with GPU multiplexing or paravirtualisation. Right now the costs are prohibitive in the VFIO space even for things like wanting to have a segregated OS environment where you can have the rights to your 'own' PC that isn't controlled or tracked in some way. So far I think the future will be in the single GPU space where all the requirements can be para-virtualised into segregated VMs. Just buying 2 brand new GPU's with all their constraints in vBIOS or how they've been licensed and controlled is too prohibitive and too many obstacles for really democratising the use of them. If GPUs were truly free and open we'd be gaming on our preferred environments, but the walled gardens haven't opened up to the masses let alone the enthusiasts who have their own preferences.

[@stevejjd]

Im new to Linux and recently had the idea of running a PC with multiple GPUs that are passed through to various VMs. I need multiple specialised environments for VFX work. For example legacy and contemporary environments so I get the new and the old. Also need a VM per VFX company I freelance for as they all have different pipelines. Is there a forum or somewhere I can go to learn how to set up such a machine? I'm a freelance 3D artist and this setup would be core to my workflow. I'm willing to pay a technician to set it up for me. Thanks

[@flognort]

I've tinkered with VFIO and I have to say it worked far better than I expected. However after playing with steam deck's proton and lutris/wine on linux, It also works SO WELL!! What's the benefit of running VFIO rather than just playing games through WINE?

[@r0bo11]

I believe with WINE there is a translation layer that causes latency issues whereas a direct passthrough is more beneficial when making calls to directly the GPU. That said, gaming on a VM is partially a better solution but not when it comes to DRM and anti-cheat software getting users banned for using it.

[@Smithdude_]

L1L is back!

[@Xankill3r]

I don't know if VFIO already works with iGPUs or not. But I can definitely see it being a very useful option for doing something like virtualised Windows on Linux in order to play the handful of multiplayer games that need Windows to run. If I have a dGPU + a CPU with a good iGPU (hopefully we get Phoenix point or similar on desktop soon) then I could hand one of them to the host and one of them to the guest. Either works for the guest because for most competitive multiplayer games you're anyways going to be running them at low settings to get the absolute best performance and the other GPU can continue to be used for the host system for other work in the background.

[@bosstowndynamics5488]

You don't really need the iGPU to be available for pass through if you have a dGPU since you can just do whatever high performance thing in the guest and use the iGPU for the host system. If you're going for a 2 gamers one computer setup then it still doesn't really matter most of the time because you can just run whichever game you would have run on the iGPU on the host system.

[@Xankill3r]

@@bosstowndynamics5488 that sounds fair

[@Jango1989]

I love vfio! I use it for gaming and research where I need to isolate the guest.

[@gjkrisa]

I love this project. I’m running into an issue where I want a no maintenance pc so no pc fan but this pc has no pci slots for a graphics card so I’m using i5 onboard to run proxmox but I want a gpu to pass through a windows vm to a monitor that has a camera pointed at the sky to capture the aurora and streamed to KZbin for an Airbnb website.