[vfio-users] Questions for all who have gotten this to work

[ALG Bass]

Ah! The man to talk to. Does the hyperthreading on the Xeon work well in
the Windows VM? How many cores/threads do you dedicate to the VM? How well
does the HD4600 graphics work in Windows?

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Alex Williamson <alex.williamson at redhat.com
> wrote:

> On Thu, 2015-09-03 at 16:10 +0200, Zycorax Tokoroa wrote:
> > I hope no one minds if I add my own question at this. I'd like to hear
> > suggestions on the second GPU to take, keeping an eye on the power drain
> > and the heat generated.
> >
> > The current hardware configuration is this:
> > Corsair Cx750M
> > ASUS X99-Deluxe (which seems to support ACS and hence need no patch?)
>
> Depends on where you install the card.  We have quirks for the X99
> chipset (and in fact most Intel chipsets, except the latest) to enforce
> isolation of the PCH root ports, but Intel client processors (Core
> i7/i5) and Xeon E3 do not support ACS on the processor root ports.
> You'd need a Xeon E5 platform to be completely clear of the ACS issues.
>
> > ASUS STRIX GTX 970
> > Intel i7-5930K
> >
> > I take that it's recommended, in order to have other configurations
> > available, such as both GPUs working in parallel on the same (host) OS,
> > to avoid using both NVidia and ATI, and the graphic cards have to be the
> > same model (although different OCs are theoretically allowed) in case of
> > SLI.
> >
> > I suppose that this should restrict the best choice between another 970
> > and a 960
>
> Generally it's recommended that a GPU for a VM is dedicated to the VM,
> graphics drivers on Linux don't really like unbinding devices.  The
> Nvidia proprietary driver in particular will not cleanly unbind from a
> device to assign to a guest and a bug filed against Nvidia for this
> issue was closed wontfix.  That doesn't prevent rebooting between
> configurations where the host can take advantage of multiple GPUs, but
> AFAIK nobody has gotten SLI to work in a VM, so strike that out as a
> possibility unless someone is willing to invest development time on it.
>
> All things considered, I personally prefer Nvidia for VMs, even despite
> their passive aggressive actions to prevent GeForce assignment.  Their
> cards handle reset and after you get past the Code 43 issues (and
> assuming they don't add new ones), the drivers don't BSOD like the AMD
> ones are prone to.  Maxwell has quite nice power efficiency as well.
>
> If you choose the right AMD card, they can work well and I'm sure others
> will chime in with their success stories for AMD.
>
> And to answer the original questions:
>
> > What distro do you use?
>
> Fedora
>
> > What kernel are you running? Did you have to re-compile it?
>
> 4.1.x, stock distro
>
> > What CPU and GPUs do you use?
>
> Xeon E3-1245v2 + EVGA GTX750 SC.  I also have an HD8570 configuration in
> the same box as documented in my blog.
>
> > What online tutorial did you use?
>
> My own :)
>
> > How long have you had it going in a stable fashion?
>
> Running (with different cards) since before my KVM Forum 2013
> presentation, so roughly two years.  I'd only consider it stable since
> being able to use stock QEMU and kernel with OVMF, so more like one
> year.
>
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