[vfio-users] Xeon E5-2670 + ASRock Rack EP2C602

[Nicholas Sherlock]

That is the precise hardware configuration I'm running, with macOS Sierra
and Windows 10 guests. I pass through an R9 280X to Windows, and a GeForce
GTX 750 Ti to macOS without issues. macOS doesn't play nice with the R9
280X if booting using SeaBIOS, triggering host freezes on boot, but these
problems go away under UEFI. I'm not much of a gamer, and I don't have any
game benchmarks on bare metal, but games seem to play okay on the guest for
me. I have a couple of blog posts here about it, using Proxmox/KVM as the
hypervisor:

http://www.nicksherlock.com/2016/10/installing-macos-sierra-on-proxmox-4-3-qemu-2-6-1/

I also pass through two of the onboard USB controllers and a NVMe SSD to
macOS. macOS seems to struggle a bit with sending audio through USB, with
dropouts every few hours requiring the USB audio to be replugged, but this
might just be the USB audio chipset. SSD performance is significantly
reduced in my macOS guest compared to the host, which I'm assuming is a
performance limitation of this early CPU. Host achieves 74,000 random 4kB
reads per second, while guest only sees 33,000. I haven't played around
with that enough to pin down the cause.

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock

On 5 November 2016 at 02:56, Jan Wiele <jan at wiele.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> inspired by [1] and in need of a new computer, I settled with the idea to
> get
> 2x Xeon E5-2670 and an ASRock Rack EP2C602.
>
> Its main purpose is to provide 2-3 (mediocre) gaming VMs with (Nvidia) GPU-
> passthrough. Before I buy these parts, I have some questions:
>
> * Has anyone experience with this hardware configuration? Especially
> regarding
> VFIO.
> * How does missing APIC-V impact the gaming performance? [2] shows little
> improvements in IO scenarios.
> * Is there better hardware with the same value? The Mainboard + 2 CPUs will
> cost me around 500€.
>
> For the future, I hope that games can utilize more CPU cores and that
> Vulkan/
> DX12 with less API overhead, makes more space for the actual game.
>
> Regards,
> Jan
>
> [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/2016-May/msg00122.html
> [2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/12/17/apic-
> virtualization-performance-testing-and-iozone
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> vfio-users mailing list
> vfio-users at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/attachments/20161221/9f74d106/attachment.htm>