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Passthrough is workable right now. It’s a pain to get set up, but it is workable. You don’t need vgpu to get the job done. I’ve had two set ups over time: one
by strstr 5y ago
Passthrough is workable right now. It’s a pain to get set up, but it is workable.
You don’t need vgpu to get the job done. I’ve had two set ups over time: one based on a jank old secondary gpu that is used by the vm host, another based on just using the jank integrated graphics on my chip.
Even still, I dual boot because it just works. It always works, and boot times are crazy low for Windows these days. No fighting with drivers. No fighting with latency issues for non-passthrough devices. It all just works.
- DCKing 5y agoOh I'm aware of passthrough. It's just a complete second class citizen because it isn't really virtualization, it's a hack. Virtualization is about multiplexing hardware. Passthrough is the opposite of multiplexing hardware: it's about yanking a peripheral from your host system and shoving it into one single guest VM. The fact that this yanking is poorly supported and has poor UX makes complete sense. I consider true peripheral multiplexing with true GPU virtualization to be the way of the future. It's true virtualization and doesn't even require you to sacrifice and/or babysit a single PCIe connected GPU. Passthrough is just a temporary hacky workaround that people have to apply now because there's nothing better. In the best case scenario - with hardware SR-IOV support plus basic driver support for it, enabling GPU access in your VM with SR-IOV would be a simple checkbox in the virtualization software of the host. GPU passthrough can't ever get there in terms of usability.
- fock 5y agoI have a Quadro card and at least for Windows guests I can easily move the card between running guests (Linux has some problems with yanking though). Still, virtualized GPUs would be nice.
- strstr 5y agoI guess I don't really see the benefit of "true" virtualization, other than it's usability improvements. I generally want to squeeze out ever bit of performance out of the GPU if I care to share it with the guest at all (at least on my home machine). I'd be using it for playing games. For the cloud, I could imagine wanting vGPUs so you can shard the massive GPUs that are used there. But in cloud, you would then have a single device be multi-tenant, which is a bit spicy security wise. Passthrough has a very straightforward security model.
- KabirKwatra 5y agoSRIOV would allow anyone with a single gpu to be able to get into virtualization. It would eliminate the single biggest barrier to entry in the space.
- blibble 5y agopassthrough has become very easy to set up, just add your pci card in virt-manager and away you go saying that, these days I just have a second pc with a load of cheap USB switches...
- jagrsw 5y agoIt works with some cards, not with others. Eg. for Radeon Pro W5500 there's no known card reset method that works (no method from https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset works) so I had to do S3 suspend before running a VM with systemctl suspend or with rtcwake -m mem -s 2 Now I have additional RTX 2070 and it works ok.