Episode Details

Our crew walks you through their PCI Passthrough setups that let them run Windows, macOS, and distro-hop all from one Linux machine.

Forget multiple partitions, dual booting, and Hackintoshes; you can do it all with Linux and KVM.

Near-native VM performance doesn't have to be painful. You only need a few prerequisites and a little help.

Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Windows VirtIO Drivers — 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and newer require the drivers to be digitally signed.
• Alex's arch-vfio-ovmf scripts — Arch Linux installation and VFIO setup scripts
• Looking Glass - Quickstart Guide — These guides are designed to help you get Looking Glass up and running on an already configured QEMU KVM Virtual Machine that has a VGA PCI Passthrough device.
• duncanthrax/scream — Scream is a virtual device driver for Windows that provides a discrete sound device. Audio played through this device is published on your local network as a PCM multicast stream.
• ACS patch COPR — Fedora kernels with add-acs-overrides patch from Arch AUR
• ACS Override Kernel Builds — This page contains links to the latest kernel builds with the ACS override patch applied for PCI devices.
• natalie-/fedora-acs-override — Using the ACS override patch for Fedora
• VFIO tips and tricks: IOMMU Groups, inside and out — Sometimes VFIO users are befuddled that they aren't able to separate devices between host and guest or multiple guests due to IOMMU grouping and revert to using legacy KVM device assignment, or as is the case with may VFIO-VGA users, apply the PCIe ACS override patch to avoid the problem.  Let's take a moment to look at what this is really doing.
• "Error 43: Driver failed to load" on Nvidia GPUs passed to Windows VMs — Since version 337.88, Nvidia drivers on Windows check if an hypervisor is running and fail if it detects one, which results in an Error 43 in the Windows device manager. Starting with QEMU 2.5.0 and libvirt 1.3.3, the vendor_id for the hypervisor can be spoofed, which is enough to fool the Nvidia drivers into loading anyway.
• Mac OS Adds Early Support for VirtIO, Qemu - The Passthrough POST — In a new development uncovered by Qemu developer Gerd Hoffmann, Apple has apparently added early support for VirtIO and framebuffer graphics in a later Mac OS Mojave release.

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