Great video ! I really appreciate your efforts and this looks like it will be an awesome series. VFIO has been some kind of uncharted territory for a long time and I believe that you are among the first to try and help more mainstream users. So thank you and I would love to send a coffee sized donation if you decide to add a donation link :).
SomeOrdinaryGamers did a video on VFIO call "How I Built The "Poor-Shamed" Computer..." but it's more of a quick and dirty how-to plus showcase. This thorough, comprehensive tutorial series should be a great help to people new to Linux and VMs.
Great video, and I'm looking forward to this series, but you should mention to the viewers that there is a lot of overlap between the games that don't run on Linux and the games that will ban you if they detect they're running on a VM.
Great video, glad to see more coverage around this topic. It took me a lot of effort to set this up my first time just due to how scattered information around this was or how complicated it was to understand. Thanks for making this.
Hi! Would love to see this on a laptop with Nvidia Optimus. I believe a lot of us would like to see this as it's quite a common setup but there's not many tutorials out there that covers that. Love your content!
Thanks! Glad you liked it! I'm aiming for one video a week, for these 4 videos, but I'm not sure that's going to be possible I did just upload the second one, so we're making progress! th-cam.com/video/ahAPSMiKrE4/w-d-xo.html
Great series! This playlist of videos made me finally have the tools to Change to Linux, so thank you very much, and hope you continue with the great content! But I was left with a question, how do you manage other VMs? Do you Open One at time?
Thanks so much for saying so! I'm really happy I could help you make the switch Yeah, I pretty much open them when I need them. I have virt-manager start automatically at boot, then when I need a VM I click the "play" button on it. If you ever have a VM that needs to start automatically when the computer boots, you can enable that with a checkbox in the VM settings
@@wafflesexploit ahh well if two VMs have the same GPU passed in you can't run them both at the same time. Sometimes it will give you and error and stop you, sometime your computer will do weird things. So I'm just really careful to make sure one is shutdown before starting another Does that answer the question?
hi, just a point for the "usb card" i think you don't need it, you just need, if you can to pass one of the internal USB controller of the motherboard to the VM
I used that tech to play games from a 5 years. VM with windows over slackware linux with second Video card. Some times it's tought to make VM runs but for me allways was fun.
Thank you for your videos about vfio. A few weeks ago I started with vfio, never heard of it before, and a few days later I now have a very performant win10 vm on fedora. I used a hdmi switch (a little disc on the table to switch from host to vm gpu because my monitor hasn't 2 hdmi inputs. On many monitors tge switching is complicated so I think the 10 to 15 € would be a good invest. The pci usb card stands on my rodo list, because passthrough usb devices like usb audio cards sometimes work sometimes not. It is ugly, so with a card you can pass it to the vm and works better. Currently I have the problem geforce exoerience doesn't run in the vm, it allways says the system has to be restarted when I try to open it for screen recording. But I haven't searched for this problem on the internet now.
Nice! Very awesome that you got started with VFIO so quickly! HDMI switch or a "KVM switch" is definitely a good suggestion too! I don't think I've used GeForce Experience enough to run into that problem, but hopefully there's a fix if it ever becomes enough of a bother to research
I really would like to make it happen on my PC, but seems like I can not afford the necessary hardware at the moment. But thanks for the advice what I have to go for in the future if possible!
Hi! I have a question, do you know or can you please test if LDPlayer runs in the Windows guest vm? If it does run using nested virtualization, how does it perform? I want to try a setup like this but since I need LDPlayer (or a performant android emulator) for work that is a deal breaker for me.
Btw, is there a reason you prefer Fedora over other distros when setting up GPU passtrough? I use Arch btw :) but don't mind using other distros, I just want to look smart 🙃
No specific "passthrough reason" why I like Fedora. The installer is good, it's stable, it gets recent software, low-ish barrier to entry I actually really like Arch. Especially for the wiki. They have great VFIO docs and it seemed like someone had written up every issue I ran into, back when I was using Arch more often. I think it makes you look smart cuz it forces you to become smart 😆
@@nocodenoblunder6672 yup, as long as you're not using one GPU for multiple VMs you should be good Also of note: you'd need to he doing dual GPU passthrough like I am in this video so you can use the second GPU to see what is going on in the non-GPU VMs
Very well done. I'm eyeing a Win10/Hackintosh VFIO setup but I've always faltered on network card config in the virt-manager. I'll try again someday. BTW is it possible to use existing installs of Win 10 and MacOS (opencore) that are each on a separate nvme drive as VMs?
Thanks! I'd definitely like to do a hackintosh VM too. Then I could use it build my UE4 games for Mac. It is possible! The 589s timestamp in my "virtual disk is fastest" video shows me configuring virt-manager for passing an M.2 drive with Windows 10 into the VM. th-cam.com/video/Yuw0nBprLro/w-d-xo.html That Windows install is also bootable via dual boot. I did it by passing the drive into the VM then installing Windows. Then I was able to turn everything off and boot to the disk. For some reason (secure boot?), it didn't work when I did it the other way (installing it as a native OS then passing it into a VM)
Would 16gb be sufficient for a system built around this? I know more and more games are recommending 16gb, but this may be an issue if I would need to split up the memory between the host and guest.
I bet 16gb would be enough. When I was building my system I bought 32gb because I wanted to give 16 to the host and 16 to the guest so I'd be confident I never run into an issue If you can spare the cost for an extra RAM stick, I do recommend more RAM for a VFIO setup than an equivalent build with only one OS, but I'd expect you'd be fine with 16gb for most use cases
What a coincidence! We have the same password! Also the newer 6000 series of AMD cards don't suffer from the reset bug at all so they're pretty safe for GPU pass-through. I'd also like to recommend the RX 550 as the host GPU: excellent open source drivers, Vulkan support, Freesync support with Display Port (pretty good for Looking Glass) and no external power required. A year ago it used to cost just 30$ more than the GT 710 (horrible value card in all its variants imho) but now it's pretty price inflated unfortunately...
Vfio with qemu only works for background headless gpu tasks. For gaming there is no video sync between client and server there are anoying frame drops when displaying something in the remote screen
Mate can you check the difference between native and kvm on the endwalker benchmark for FFXIV? I'm losing half of the performance on a kvm which is weird
Sorry, I don't have the game. One common issue that might be worth checking is mouse polling rate. If you try a cheap office mouse or switching the evdev and that fixes performance, then you know that was a problem. For me using USB device assignment with a high-polling rate gaming mouse made PUBG unplayable
@@BlandManStudios it’s just a benchmark no need to download Also after many optimizations I noticed the biggest jump is using iothreads which leaves me at 80% of the windows performance I am passing a mouse and a keyboard so I don’t think it matters
@@Battler624 ahh gocha. I'm glad you got the performance up It looks like an interesting benchmark. I'll give it a try when I finish redoing my setup, thanks for mentioning it
I've been viewing as many VFIO vids but the one thing I'm having trouble with is the GPU bios - the TechPowerUp sight does not list my GPU (or anything close enough for comfort). In my case a Lenovo E595 laptop w/Ryzen7 & "Raven2/Radeon VEGA Mobile series" so I'm reluctant to pursue this much further. QEMU/KVM has been so much faster than VBOX for everything else.
So I do two steps 1st is CPU pinning. Where I use XML to say "map these virtual cores to these physical cores" 2nd is CPU isolation. So I use a kernel command line arg "isolcpus" on the host to say "boot with these cores disabled" (but the VM can use them) So it would take another reboot without the arg to re-enable the cores on the host There is a dynamic way to do it like you asked, but I haven't tried it wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Dynamically_isolating_CPUs
hi. just a question. i am thinking about switching to linux from windws, and doing gpu passthrough if some apps need windows. the question is, if the guest windows os gets BSOD, will it crash the host linux os too?
That is correct! Technically, a sophisticated virus could jump from the guest to the host the way a virus can jump between two computers on the same network. But that's more of a concern for companies than it is for individuals. And having Linux on the host would make that much less likely too
You can! If you have two monitors and two sets of mouse/keyboard it's the same Additionally there is a program called LookingGlass for sharing one monitor And a program called Symless Synergy to share the mouse/keyboard They can be a little complicated to setup though
tell me where to look for information if it is not in any source and I cannot execute the iommu check script before buying? I had a board msi z77a-gd55 on a chipset z77 and CPU i7 3770 and in all respects everything should have worked on it, but when I got to the groups, they were not there. In the end, everything worked out after changing the motherboard, but it took so much time. So how should I understand whether it will work or not before buying if there is no information either in the manual or on the forums? I understand what is easier to do on hardware that is already described as 100% working, but if there is no such equipment? there is a plan for virtual machines, what and how should be spinning, what ports I will need, what hardware I will plug into these ports. only the motherboard is missing. how not to make a 100% mistake in choosing and not to spend a lot of money in vain.
Video games on windows exist because Gaming Piracy and abandoned games like (original gears of war pc and infernal), once you brought this to Linux system, then windows will goto bankruptcy
Would love to see a video on single gpu passthrough. Thank for the videos btw, great work!
Good to know! Thanks!
Great video ! I really appreciate your efforts and this looks like it will be an awesome series. VFIO has been some kind of uncharted territory for a long time and I believe that you are among the first to try and help more mainstream users. So thank you and I would love to send a coffee sized donation if you decide to add a donation link :).
Thanks! That's awesome to hear! Description has been updated, if anyone would like to buy me a coffee ;)
SomeOrdinaryGamers did a video on VFIO call "How I Built The "Poor-Shamed" Computer..." but it's more of a quick and dirty how-to plus showcase. This thorough, comprehensive tutorial series should be a great help to people new to Linux and VMs.
Thanks a lot. Great quality content, no music to listen to my own stuff at the same time, that's exactly what I needed!
Thanks! And good note on the music, I did that on purpose thinking people might want to listen to their own
Glad to hear it was the right call for you
Thank you very much for you contribution! I'm from Brazil and was desperate to find this kind of content!
Olá! Happy to help! Glad it's working for people
Great video, and I'm looking forward to this series, but you should mention to the viewers that there is a lot of overlap between the games that don't run on Linux and the games that will ban you if they detect they're running on a VM.
Thanks! That's a really good point
Seriously? What kind of games will get you banned for using a VM?
whoa whoa whoa, is it somehow related to bots or what? Can you please elaborate?
@@rondee Bungie and Destiny 2 for one
@@talkingbirb2808 some game companies are obsessive with controlling your pc entirely and their excuse is "but we want to make sure you dont cheat".
Great video, glad to see more coverage around this topic. It took me a lot of effort to set this up my first time just due to how scattered information around this was or how complicated it was to understand. Thanks for making this.
Thanks! That's great to hear! You're not alone with that experience
Hi! Would love to see this on a laptop with Nvidia Optimus. I believe a lot of us would like to see this as it's quite a common setup but there's not many tutorials out there that covers that. Love your content!
Hi! Thanks so much! That's great to know
@@BlandManStudios Thanks for the reply! Also if you would add a tutorial on looking glass with that setup would be awsome!
@@jof0ftw I would definitely love to do Looking Glass and laptops after the basics. Just hoping there is enough demand and that I have enough time
Excellent video filled with with great information on the subject. You have my respect.
Thanks! I appreciate it!
Very good video. Informative
@@nocodenoblunder6672 thanks!
Found the video very helpful, would love to see more. BTW how often will you be uploading the videos in this VFIO series? Thanks. Have a good day 😊.
Thanks! Glad you liked it! I'm aiming for one video a week, for these 4 videos, but I'm not sure that's going to be possible
I did just upload the second one, so we're making progress!
th-cam.com/video/ahAPSMiKrE4/w-d-xo.html
Damned i was looking for this info for so long .......... Now it's really clear how to setup a hackingtosh. Thx !!!!!!
Great series! This playlist of videos made me finally have the tools to Change to Linux, so thank you very much, and hope you continue with the great content!
But I was left with a question, how do you manage other VMs? Do you Open One at time?
Thanks so much for saying so! I'm really happy I could help you make the switch
Yeah, I pretty much open them when I need them. I have virt-manager start automatically at boot, then when I need a VM I click the "play" button on it. If you ever have a VM that needs to start automatically when the computer boots, you can enable that with a checkbox in the VM settings
@@BlandManStudios But do you Open them simultaneously?
@@wafflesexploit ahh well if two VMs have the same GPU passed in you can't run them both at the same time. Sometimes it will give you and error and stop you, sometime your computer will do weird things. So I'm just really careful to make sure one is shutdown before starting another
Does that answer the question?
@@BlandManStudios Yes, that helps a lot, thanks!
@@wafflesexploit np!
hi, just a point for the "usb card" i think you don't need it, you just need, if you can to pass one of the internal USB controller of the motherboard to the VM
Thanks, this is a great video.
Thanks!!!
Hey Bland, my PC only has 1 dGPU and no iGPU so I would definitly be interested in single GPU setup guide video.
I subbed cause like people who keep this community up
We absolutely want VFIO on laptops man! Please do it.
And please do VFIO on PROX-MOX bare metal
Good to know!
I’m thinking to try this with macOS for FinalCut to replace my old 2014 Mac Mini, thanks for the inspiration! :D
Nice! Happy to help! Just gotta check that your GPU is Mac compatible (I think)
I used that tech to play games from a 5 years. VM with windows over slackware linux with second Video card. Some times it's tought to make VM runs but for me allways was fun.
I agree, always fun!
I'd love to see how this works with a single GPU, please make us that video!
Good to know! Thanks for the comment!
Me too!
Impressive work, the whole tutorial and your other stuff as well
Ayyy, I appreciate all the kind words and I'm excited for you starting your Linux journey!
Thank you for your videos about vfio. A few weeks ago I started with vfio, never heard of it before, and a few days later I now have a very performant win10 vm on fedora.
I used a hdmi switch (a little disc on the table to switch from host to vm gpu because my monitor hasn't 2 hdmi inputs. On many monitors tge switching is complicated so I think the 10 to 15 € would be a good invest.
The pci usb card stands on my rodo list, because passthrough usb devices like usb audio cards sometimes work sometimes not. It is ugly, so with a card you can pass it to the vm and works better.
Currently I have the problem geforce exoerience doesn't run in the vm, it allways says the system has to be restarted when I try to open it for screen recording. But I haven't searched for this problem on the internet now.
Nice! Very awesome that you got started with VFIO so quickly!
HDMI switch or a "KVM switch" is definitely a good suggestion too!
I don't think I've used GeForce Experience enough to run into that problem, but hopefully there's a fix if it ever becomes enough of a bother to research
Sweet bro thank you!
I really would like to make it happen on my PC, but seems like I can not afford the necessary hardware at the moment. But thanks for the advice what I have to go for in the future if possible!
Hi! I have a question, do you know or can you please test if LDPlayer runs in the Windows guest vm? If it does run using nested virtualization, how does it perform? I want to try a setup like this but since I need LDPlayer (or a performant android emulator) for work that is a deal breaker for me.
LDPlayer seems to work fine in my VM. I'm actually about to post a YT short showing a screen recording. I'll post a link when its up!
Posted video here: th-cam.com/video/ZPc00fvzBUY/w-d-xo.html
Please make a setup video for laptops. :)
This laptop setup isn't perfect, but it works
th-cam.com/video/m8xj2Py8KPc/w-d-xo.html
Btw, is there a reason you prefer Fedora over other distros when setting up GPU passtrough? I use Arch btw :) but don't mind using other distros, I just want to look smart 🙃
No specific "passthrough reason" why I like Fedora. The installer is good, it's stable, it gets recent software, low-ish barrier to entry
I actually really like Arch. Especially for the wiki. They have great VFIO docs and it seemed like someone had written up every issue I ran into, back when I was using Arch more often. I think it makes you look smart cuz it forces you to become smart 😆
Can anyone recommend a good AMD mini itx motherboard for vfio?
What about multiple vms. Can I passthrough the gpu to a vm of my choice while also running other vms with no gpu?
@@nocodenoblunder6672 yup, as long as you're not using one GPU for multiple VMs you should be good
Also of note: you'd need to he doing dual GPU passthrough like I am in this video so you can use the second GPU to see what is going on in the non-GPU VMs
Have you tried single gpu passthrough with hdmi/displayport dummy?
I have started using Looking Glass, but haven't tried single GPU or a dummy plug/port
Very well done. I'm eyeing a Win10/Hackintosh VFIO setup but I've always faltered on network card config in the virt-manager. I'll try again someday.
BTW is it possible to use existing installs of Win 10 and MacOS (opencore) that are each on a separate nvme drive as VMs?
Thanks! I'd definitely like to do a hackintosh VM too. Then I could use it build my UE4 games for Mac.
It is possible! The 589s timestamp in my "virtual disk is fastest" video shows me configuring virt-manager for passing an M.2 drive with Windows 10 into the VM.
th-cam.com/video/Yuw0nBprLro/w-d-xo.html
That Windows install is also bootable via dual boot. I did it by passing the drive into the VM then installing Windows. Then I was able to turn everything off and boot to the disk. For some reason (secure boot?), it didn't work when I did it the other way (installing it as a native OS then passing it into a VM)
Would 16gb be sufficient for a system built around this? I know more and more games are recommending 16gb, but this may be an issue if I would need to split up the memory between the host and guest.
I bet 16gb would be enough. When I was building my system I bought 32gb because I wanted to give 16 to the host and 16 to the guest so I'd be confident I never run into an issue
If you can spare the cost for an extra RAM stick, I do recommend more RAM for a VFIO setup than an equivalent build with only one OS, but I'd expect you'd be fine with 16gb for most use cases
What a coincidence! We have the same password!
Also the newer 6000 series of AMD cards don't suffer from the reset bug at all so they're pretty safe for GPU pass-through.
I'd also like to recommend the RX 550 as the host GPU: excellent open source drivers, Vulkan support, Freesync support with Display Port (pretty good for Looking Glass) and no external power required. A year ago it used to cost just 30$ more than the GT 710 (horrible value card in all its variants imho) but now it's pretty price inflated unfortunately...
Good eyes but terrible security practice haha!
Thanks for adding these hardware recommendations! This is great info I didn't have!
I'm using a Radeon pro wx4100 for that exact purpose as well as a 5700xt as my pt card, working super stable so far
Vfio with qemu only works for background headless gpu tasks. For gaming there is no video sync between client and server there are anoying frame drops when displaying something in the remote screen
Mate can you check the difference between native and kvm on the endwalker benchmark for FFXIV? I'm losing half of the performance on a kvm which is weird
Sorry, I don't have the game. One common issue that might be worth checking is mouse polling rate. If you try a cheap office mouse or switching the evdev and that fixes performance, then you know that was a problem.
For me using USB device assignment with a high-polling rate gaming mouse made PUBG unplayable
@@BlandManStudios it’s just a benchmark no need to download
Also after many optimizations I noticed the biggest jump is using iothreads which leaves me at 80% of the windows performance
I am passing a mouse and a keyboard so I don’t think it matters
@@Battler624 ahh gocha. I'm glad you got the performance up
It looks like an interesting benchmark. I'll give it a try when I finish redoing my setup, thanks for mentioning it
I've been viewing as many VFIO vids but the one thing I'm having trouble with is the GPU bios - the TechPowerUp sight does not list my GPU (or anything close enough for comfort). In my case a Lenovo E595 laptop w/Ryzen7 & "Raven2/Radeon VEGA Mobile series" so I'm reluctant to pursue this much further. QEMU/KVM has been so much faster than VBOX for everything else.
When you reserve the cpu cores, does the host os get them back when you’re not running the vm?
So I do two steps
1st is CPU pinning. Where I use XML to say "map these virtual cores to these physical cores"
2nd is CPU isolation. So I use a kernel command line arg "isolcpus" on the host to say "boot with these cores disabled" (but the VM can use them)
So it would take another reboot without the arg to re-enable the cores on the host
There is a dynamic way to do it like you asked, but I haven't tried it
wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Dynamically_isolating_CPUs
YES
You're awesome
hi. just a question.
i am thinking about switching to linux from windws, and doing gpu passthrough if some apps need windows.
the question is, if the guest windows os gets BSOD, will it crash the host linux os too?
How can you tell Linux is the future of gaming? I'm not seeing a bit of clue in the market for that direction.
would the main os be isolated from viruses i install on the vm
That is correct!
Technically, a sophisticated virus could jump from the guest to the host the way a virus can jump between two computers on the same network. But that's more of a concern for companies than it is for individuals. And having Linux on the host would make that much less likely too
Can you lease show how to do that on a laptop?
Too bad I had not watched this yet before buying a new PC. Let's see how it performs when it comes in.
I feel that, I didn't have compatible hardware for a long time
Hopefully everything works well with your new PC and congrats on making the purchase!
Can you use both linux and windows on the same times?
You can! If you have two monitors and two sets of mouse/keyboard it's the same
Additionally there is a program called LookingGlass for sharing one monitor
And a program called Symless Synergy to share the mouse/keyboard
They can be a little complicated to setup though
An alternative for the tools would be a hdmi switch anf an udb switch. They cost only a few euro or Dollar and work allways without bugs ;-)
tell me where to look for information if it is not in any source and I cannot execute the iommu check script before buying? I had a board msi z77a-gd55 on a chipset z77 and CPU i7 3770 and in all respects everything should have worked on it, but when I got to the groups, they were not there. In the end, everything worked out after changing the motherboard, but it took so much time. So how should I understand whether it will work or not before buying if there is no information either in the manual or on the forums? I understand what is easier to do on hardware that is already described as 100% working, but if there is no such equipment? there is a plan for virtual machines, what and how should be spinning, what ports I will need, what hardware I will plug into these ports. only the motherboard is missing. how not to make a 100% mistake in choosing and not to spend a lot of money in vain.
so gpu from nvidia works ?
I hope my chinese x79 + Xeon can do this.
Would be cool if it works!
Guess it's time to dust off my old gtx 750 ti for a dual gpu setup.
Yess!! Old hardware always comes in handy!
doesn't work with valorant ://
Big sad, I've heard the Valorant anti-cheat is aaaaaaagressive
@@BlandManStudios yeah. There was a way but they patched it instantly. I don't know why they're so hell-bent on being a Windows-exclusive
Video games on windows exist because Gaming Piracy and abandoned games like (original gears of war pc and infernal), once you brought this to Linux system, then windows will goto bankruptcy
That's a good point
F'n instasubbed
2:52 errrr
Until gaming on “Linux” is streamlined and made easier for the novice, it will remain a very small part of the gaming community.