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SarahS93
l33t
Joined: 21 Nov 2013
Posts: 693
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 Posted: Fri May 01, 2015 6:06 am Post subject: How to create a gaming VM with passthrough based on a Gentoo |
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Im very interested to create a gaming VM with GPU passthrough based on a Gentoo Hostsystem.
Do i need Xen? VirtualBox? or is Qemu good for GPU passthrough?
I use Qemu for some VM on my existing Gentoo-System, it works fine.
What Hardware do i need for a gaming VM?
At the moment i run on a Intel Core i7-2600, they can vt-d.
My Mainboard is based on a P67 Chipset, i read that the P67 does not have vt-d support.
With the release of the 6th Intel CPU generation and the 100-Series Chipsets i plan to buy some new hardware.
I am not sure if an AMD or NVidia GPU the better way for compatibility and passthrough.
I like NVidia but AMD have a 3W (ZeroCore-Power) Option i read.
NVidia does only have 12W by doing nothing.
My System runs 24h/7day so i need so save power where i can.
Can i use the 3W ZeroCore-Power option with AMD on Linux or is this a Windows-only feature?
Do you run a gaming VM? |
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tholin
Apprentice
Joined: 04 Oct 2008
Posts: 203
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| Posted: Fri May 01, 2015 2:53 pm Post subject: Re: How to create a gaming VM with passthrough based on a Ge |
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| SarahS93 wrote: | | Do you run a gaming VM? |
Yes, and if you ask me it's not worth the effort.
The hardware you need is a cpu with iommu support, a mobo with a chipset with iommu support with a bios with iommu support. The bios is sometimes buggy and iommu doesn't work even though the mobo should support it. You also need to use pci devices compatible with iommu. Most devices are compatible but some have hardware bugs causing problems only with iommu.
To avoid problems you also want a cpu and mobo with support for Access Control Services (ACS). I don't know of any intel consumer cpus with support for that. You need to get a xeon and avoid the cheaper xeons like E3-1200 because they also don't have support. I've heard all amd cpus have support for ACS but I can't confirm that.
More info about the ACS related problem here http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/iommu-groups-inside-and-out.html
Finding out if some hardware got the right support before buying it is close to impossible. You'll have to guess and hope for the best.
I use qemu and it works fine for me.
Different graphic cards got different problems. It seems like newer versions of nvidias windows drivers check if it's running in a virtual machines and refuse to load. That problem can be worked around for now. Some amd cards have reset problems. The VM start once but can't be rebooted. Bonaire and Hawaii models are affected by that.
Check the other posts in that blog link for other relevant info. |
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kernelOfTruth
Watchman
Joined: 20 Dec 2005
Posts: 6111
Location: Vienna, Austria; Germany; hello world :)
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shazeal
Apprentice
Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 206
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Fri May 01, 2015 6:07 pm Post subject: |
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I used this thread to setup my VMs
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768&p=1
I managed to get OSX and Windows 7 running almost flawlessly. The windows side was rather painless since there is a lot of support for that.
The best thing to come out of it for me was discovering Qsynergy, its an amazing application 
_________________
CFLAGS="-OmgWTFR1CE --fun-lol-loops --march=asmx86go" |
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szatox
Advocate
Joined: 27 Aug 2013
Posts: 3134
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| Posted: Fri May 01, 2015 8:48 pm Post subject: |
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I saw some video on YT showing one of those, based on qemu+kvm with PCIe passthrough (And mouse shared with synergy).
A guy who showed it claimed to have reached over 99% of native performance, with downside being it required 2 graphic cards (one for linux and 1 for passthrough) as it was hard or impossible to re-initialize it when booting and shutting down the VM.
Well, I wasn't able to distinguish between PRNG running on KVM and directly on host.
One remark on synergy from me, it's a handy thing for desktops, but I was unable to control camera with remote mouse in WoW. It was like if synergy passed absolute coords and wow dragged pointer to the middle of screen, and then synergy would move it again, and wow would drag it to the middle, and synergy.....
It would just turn rapidly, making whole thing completly unplayable.
edit: Thanks for that tip tholin, I'll keep it around for when I need synergy again 
Last edited by szatox on Sat May 02, 2015 6:18 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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tholin
Apprentice
Joined: 04 Oct 2008
Posts: 203
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| Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 10:18 am Post subject: |
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| szatox wrote: | One remark on synergy from me, it's a handy thing for desktops, but I was unable to control camera with remote mouse in WoW. It was like if synergy passed absolute coords and wow dragged pointer to the middle of screen, and then synergy would move it again, and wow would drag it to the middle, and synergy.....
It would just turn rapidly, making whole thing completly unplayable. |
Add this to your synergy.conf
| Code: |
section: options
relativeMouseMoves = true
end
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When the mouse cursor is on the windows desktop press scrlk on your keyboard to lock the cursor to that desktop. Then relative mouse movements work. |
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