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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I'm using VMware, I'm not sure if that uses KVM. It should have GPU passthrough though, yes.

Nope, VMWare is a type-2 hypervisor, not a type-1 like KVM. (Unless you're using ESXI, but you would know if you were.)

Mind, VMWare + GPU passthrough really should have more than acceptable performance, so I'm surprised.

It's not that it's abysmal, it's just annoying enough to prevent me from using it. I stopped using it a while ago, I possibly had issues with my Wacom tablet as well, but I don't really recall.

Do you know a type-1 hypervisor I could use on Linux? Will QEMU do? Thanks for the info!

Qemu can do it, but you explicitly need to configure it to use kvm. And then you need to set it up to use GPU passthrough.

It's a somewhat involved process, especially for GPU passthrough.

On Ubuntu ish systems (not sure about base debians), you can get full KVM support in qemu by installing the "qemu-kvm" package right out the repos and then starting your VMs with the "-enable-kvm" switch. You may also need to get EFI working in qemu to support OSX EFI bootloader, which you can get by installing the "ovmf" package right out the repos, and then adding the "-bios OVMF.fd" switch to your qemu command (OVMF.fd being the firmware file used by qemu to do EFI, which the "ovmf" package seems to install near /usr/share/qemu/OVMF.fd). I'm not sure about GPU passthrough, but with full KVM support enabled, you will immediately notice a pretty huge difference in the performance of the VM.

Thanks, I think I did enable KVM in QEMU and OS X is pretty snappy. There's a bug where the mouse can't tell where the screen bounds are, and stops in the middle of the screen, but that's unrelated. Thanks for the tip!

I'm not sure about on Linux, but the GPU passthrough on Macos (Fusion) is not like KVM passthrough. When I looked into it I found out it's for one specific use case. Won't increase performance for general apps like Photoshop.

Yeah, macOS doesn't really have GPU passthrough.

But on Linux, you can do GPU passthrough on Linux for macOS (and Windows) guests.

In particular, since no VM has graphics acceleration for macOS guests, and because macOS relies very heavily on graphics acceleration, GPU passthrough is basically the only way to comfortably use macOS inside of a VM.

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