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I tried to hold out for the Intel launch anticipating sr-iov support, but I ended up refreshing hardware before. Any half-decent motherboard has their iommu gro

I tried to hold out for the Intel launch anticipating sr-iov support, but I ended up refreshing hardware before. Any half-decent motherboard has their iommu groups proper, allowing passing any pci device into a vm with minimal overhead. It sure sucks to need two cards, but I went/want AMD for Linux and still(sadly) NVIDIA for Windows. It works really great. A 3 display setup where left is always Linux, right is always windows (when it's running) and middle is switched between inputs with ddcutil (cli tool to reconfigure your display). I tried looking-glass framebuffer copy over a shared memory bus but it wasn't quite as smooth for me as switching inputs. I'm on low-end gear, AMD 5600x, AMD 390, NVIDIA 3060, ASUS X570-P board. No tuning whatsoever, I let the Linux scheduler deal with it and it's good enough. I can't recommend looking-glass enough as your spice client for mouse and keyboard capture, it's great. Though this can all go fck right off if someone(Intel) does SR-IOV on consumer gear, I will replace my cards in a beat.

tjoff 4y ago
Problem is, there is no decent AMD card (and I will not touch nvidia for linux) with decent number of outputs for that use-case (in my opinion). The cheapest ones are like 8 years old and out of support and still costs like $250, comes with a fan and still doesn't have decent outputs. And also takes a lot of PCI-E slots. A dual graphics card system means you barely have expandability options left after you have the hardware required to boot. And that ~one PCI-E slot still visible might be disabled if you decide to use another NVME-drive. The amount of research required to pull it off is insane. This is my biggest hope for Intel/ARC. A low powered card with decent number of outputs for a fair price and decent linux support.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  What exactly are you looking for? There's both the single slot 6400 with dual outputs or the dual slot 6600 with 4 outputs. And both are modern RDNA2 architectures.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    3+ digital outputs, preferably passive and preferably one slot (though many compromises have to be made). 6600 costs about $350 where I live, which is quite steep considering it's only purpose is to serve 2D and very basic 3D editing. Especially considering you'd also need a more capable/expensive card for the VM (at least for my usecase) . Compared to A380 with 4 digital outputs which costs less than $200, it has the potential to be an extremely attractive linux card.
    - kllrnohj 4y ago
      Have you considered a DisplayPort hub? MST support has been a thing for a long time, it should work pretty well (particularly since this is basically how ~every thunderbolt & usbc dock works)
      - tjoff 4y ago
        I have MST on my displays and it is a disaster. Also, considering the usecase where you use the VM to drive one of the displays which breaks the MST chain. For this reason and how displayport/gfx-vendors handle unplugged cables I do prefer HDMI/DVI. Wish it wasn't the case. Maybe a MST-hub could work well but I've heard of some of the difficulties and pecularities a simple KVM-switch can suffer from so I don't have high hopes for it.

tjoff 4y ago

Problem is, there is no decent AMD card (and I will not touch nvidia for linux) with decent number of outputs for that use-case (in my opinion). The cheapest ones are like 8 years old and out of support and still costs like $250, comes with a fan and still doesn't have decent outputs. And also takes a lot of PCI-E slots. A dual graphics card system means you barely have expandability options left after you have the hardware required to boot. And that ~one PCI-E slot still visible might be disabled if you decide to use another NVME-drive. The amount of research required to pull it off is insane. This is my biggest hope for Intel/ARC. A low powered card with decent number of outputs for a fair price and decent linux support.

kllrnohj 4y ago
What exactly are you looking for? There's both the single slot 6400 with dual outputs or the dual slot 6600 with 4 outputs. And both are modern RDNA2 architectures.
- tjoff 4y ago
  3+ digital outputs, preferably passive and preferably one slot (though many compromises have to be made). 6600 costs about $350 where I live, which is quite steep considering it's only purpose is to serve 2D and very basic 3D editing. Especially considering you'd also need a more capable/expensive card for the VM (at least for my usecase) . Compared to A380 with 4 digital outputs which costs less than $200, it has the potential to be an extremely attractive linux card.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    Have you considered a DisplayPort hub? MST support has been a thing for a long time, it should work pretty well (particularly since this is basically how ~every thunderbolt & usbc dock works)
    - tjoff 4y ago
      I have MST on my displays and it is a disaster. Also, considering the usecase where you use the VM to drive one of the displays which breaks the MST chain. For this reason and how displayport/gfx-vendors handle unplugged cables I do prefer HDMI/DVI. Wish it wasn't the case. Maybe a MST-hub could work well but I've heard of some of the difficulties and pecularities a simple KVM-switch can suffer from so I don't have high hopes for it.