Arch Linux

mcmillion

Member

Registered: 2019-06-08

Posts: 1

VFIO PCI Passthrough "works", but the VM is unusably slow

It's another one of these posts!

I'm trying to get a Windows VM working under Arch with VFIO. I've run into the issue that I've seen all over the place where the VM takes forever to boot and then runs _incredibly slow_ (we're talking 1 frame every 5 seconds), but none of the things I've tried have had any real impact. After some experimentation I assume this has at least something to do with the amount of memory I'm trying to give it (originally 16gb, down to 8gb), but none of the resolutions I've found online fix it.

Here's my system:

Motherboard: Asus PRIME X399-A
CPU: AMD Threadripper 2950X
Memory: 64GB DDR4 (4x16GB)
GPU 1 (in use by Arch): Nvidia GTX 1060
GPU 2 (passed into guest): Nvidia RTX 2080

Here's a gist with everything I could think that would be useful: https://gist.github.com/mcmillion/7cee4 … cf822120fe

Here's where I'm at:

* AMD virtualization settings are enabled on the motherboard
* I've also enabled ACS, IOMMU+IVRS, and set Memory Interleave to Channel as per https://tripleback.net/post/chasingvfioperformance/
* AMD IOMMU is enabled in kernel options, as well `allow_unsafe_interrupts`
* The 2080's VGA, Audio, USB, and Serial Bus are all in a single group and passthrough to the VM fine (I get video output when I start it)
* I've pinned the CPUs based on diagram from running `lstop -l` as per https://bytee.net/blog/amd-threadripper … assthrough
* I've set up hugepages and tried both the default 2048kb size and 1GB size
* I've confirmed that `info kvm` shows KVM is running in the guest

This is my first time using QEMU/KVM and my first time attempting a VFIO setup, so I'm sure I'm missing something really basic.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,515

Re: VFIO PCI Passthrough "works", but the VM is unusably slow

Nvidia doesn't like it when consumer grade cards (non-quadro) are used in virtual machines , maybe that's the cause.

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PC … indows_VMs

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky