Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

Dual booting is for chumps. If I could run a base Linux system and arbitrarily run fully hardware accelerated VMs of multiple Linux distros, BSDs and Windows, I'd be all over that. I could pretend here that I really need the ability to quickly switch between OSes, that I'd like VM-based snapshots, or that I have big use cases to multiplex the hardware power in my desktop box like that. I really don't need it. I just want it.

I really hope Intel sees this as an opportunity for their DG2 graphics cards due out later this year.

If anyone from Intel is reading this: if you guys want to carve out a niche for yourself, and have power users advocate for your hardware - this is it. Enable SR-IOV for your upcoming Xe DG2 GPU line just as you do for your Xe integrated graphics. Just observe the lengths that people go to for their Nvidia cards, injecting code into their proprietary drivers just to run this. You can make this a champion feature just by not disabling something your hardware can already do. Add some driver support for it in the mix and you'll have an instant enthusiast fanbase for years to come.

I've been running proxmox. I haven't run windows, but I have ubuntu vm's with full hardware gpu passthrough. I've passed through nvidia and intel gpus.

I also have a macos vm, but I didn't set up gpu passthrough for that. Tried it once, it hung, didn't try it again. I use remote desktop anyway.

here are some misc links:

https://manjaro.site/how-to-enable-gpu-passthrough-on-proxmo...

https://manjaro.site/tips-to-create-ubuntu-20-04-vm-on-proxm...

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough

https://blog.konpat.me/dev/2019/03/11/setting-up-lxc-for-int...

>macOS VM

What is the current licensing situation on this? Can I use it legally to build software for Mac?

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.

Oh 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.

I 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.

I 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.

SRIOV 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.

passthrough 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...

It 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 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.

Given that I use my desktop 90% of the time remotely these days, I'm going to set this up next time I'm home and move my Windows stuff into a VM. Then I can run Docker natively on the host and when Windows stops cooperating, just create a new VM (which I can't do remotely with it running on bare metal, at least without the risk of it not coming back up).

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