<div dir="ltr">Alex, thanks. That's very useful feedback. I prefer 13" laptops in general so unless this is a probable home-run on passthrough, I'll likely skip it and stick with building a desktop system (it's just for running adobe apps in a vm). <div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 9:56 AM Alex Williamson <<a href="mailto:alex.williamson@redhat.com">alex.williamson@redhat.com</a>> wrote: </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On Sat, 2015-10-10 at 16:13 +0000, Ethan Schoonover wrote: > I've been meaning to build or buy a gpu passthrough capable system for a > while and would like to get some advice on whether the new Dell XPS-15 > (9550) laptop is likely to support this. > > The specs are here: <a href="http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd</a> . > Relevantly, the new XPS-15 comes with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M which I'd > be using as the passthrough GPU for a windows VM running on an Arch host > (which would thus be using Intel graphics). Additionally, it's a skylake > mobile cpu and according to the Intel site does have vt-d support. > > I've reviewed the spreadsheet here: > <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LnGpTrXalwGVNy0PWJDURhyxa3sgqkGXmvNCIvIMenk/edit#gid=2" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LnGpTrXalwGVNy0PWJDURhyxa3sgqkGXmvNCIvIMenk/edit#gid=2</a> > and > find that there are some working configurations with mobile nvidia GPUs, so > I'm assuming that this is in the realm of possibility. > > I know it's impossible to say without hardware in hand, but do you think > it's likely that the new Dell unit will (potentially) support my desired > GPU passthrough? Are there any obvious show stoppers you can imagine? > > I know this is a broad, vfio-noob type question. I do appreciate any advice! Possible, yes. Likely, no. If you look carefully at the raw data in the spreadsheet, there are many more failures with laptops than there are successes. If you would get the laptop anyway and want to try this on it, great, but if getting this working is a requirement for that to be a good laptop choice for you, your chances of success are slim. Thanks, Alex </blockquote></div></div>