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#1 2017-04-12 04:44:12

nannerpussy
Member
Registered: 2017-02-15
Posts: 96

Concerning VFIO, using two GPU cards in two slots with a VM or WINE

I posted this in the VFIO Subreddit, but I thought I'd also ask here to possibly get an Arch user's perspective:


I have an AMD board with a AMD FX-6100 processor (KVM) and two graphics cards - an older RadeonSI card (which coincidentally recently fell into Mesa support and I setup to use Gallium 9 with WINE/POL via wine-gaming-nine in the AUR) and an nVIDIA GTX770 that I can't use because something physically happened to it and it displays green lines on my screen, no matter which PCI-e slot I use it in. I do have two PCI ports, one at 4x and one at 16x which can both accommodate graphics cards. I know for certain it's a physical problem and possibly a capacitor or solder issue and is not a motherboard issue, lines are there from BIOS to OS, in any distro. So, a few months back I had to plugin this older ATI Radeon card and I've been stuck using it until I can afford a nice new card.

What I'm wondering though is if there is a VFIO and/or VM setup possible where only the GPU power of the GTX770 is used for rendering games, while the display output still routes through my regular ATI card? I currently use VMs on occasion, but have no need for Windows and don't even own a copy of Windows anymore. I've been using Arch now for a while, but I have a big Steam library with lots of Windows-only games I bought when I was still on Windows and I'd love to be able to play many other Windows-only games. I wish I knew more about POL and Wine emulation, but is there any chance of this working using GPU passthrough somehow? Without WINE? If I did manage to get a CD key for Windows 10 or something, and I had it on a VM, would it be possible in that situation? Is there another solution here using only WINE that I'm not seeing?

The only issue with the nVIDIA card are the green lines. It's perfectly fine otherwise and I don't understand VFIO well enough to know if what I'm thinking is even possible in the first place. Use nVIDIA GPU's power in some kind of pass through environment while having the ATI card be the actual display adapter my monitor uses.

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#2 2017-04-12 06:27:37

mich41
Member
Registered: 2012-06-22
Posts: 796

Re: Concerning VFIO, using two GPU cards in two slots with a VM or WINE

I suppose you would need to passthrough the GTX to Windows VM to eliminate virtualization overhead from rendering. But then you need to somehow convince Windows not to use this GPU for output and display the game on some other (passed-through or emulated) GPU instead.

I think you now need to ask some Windows guys about that. It should be possible in principle because Windows supports those dual-GPU laptops, but I don't know whether this can be hacked to work on some arbitrary pair of GPUs on some random VM.

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#3 2017-04-19 21:19:14

dRaiser
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2013-05-20
Posts: 51
Website

Re: Concerning VFIO, using two GPU cards in two slots with a VM or WINE

Perhaps not crazy idea would be to use Steam Home Streaming to send video to Linux guest on ATI?

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