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

Fri Jan 6 00:20:18 UTC 2017

Hi, just wanted to report my results:

I've bought the mainboard and the two CPUs. I'm successfully running 
three gaming VMs (Geforce 770, 970, 1070) with 8 GB of RAM each.

There are no problems at all (like crashes or audio/USB problems)! Some 
games (like Heroes of the Storm) show a large performance decrease 
compared to native Windows installations, which I don't understand.
Other games, like Witcher 3, Division, Talos Principle, Battlefield 1 
and Doom are able to max out my Geforce 1070 (GPU Load > 95% in GPU-Z).

In my first message, I mentioned that I'm hoping for DX12 and Vulkan to 
improve the performance of games on my setup. I did a little benchmark 
with Doom.

OpenGL: 90fps
Vulkan: 120fps

Other games (Talos Principle, Battlefield 1, Division) did not show a 
better/worse performance with DX12 or Vulkan. However, they can already 
max out my GPU with DX11. I've yet to test them in a more CPU intensive 
scenario.

Am 2016-12-23 10:14, schrieb Zachary Boley:
> I run 2 Xeon 5540s currently with my passthrough build, nothing fancy
> just a normal Windows 10 VM with passthrough and everything seems
> setup real well (had to switch to RAW instead of qcow2). Other than
> the occasional audio scratch up it runs pretty much like windows would
> normally run. My only question im still struggling with is making sure
> I pinned the correct cpu cores (physical not hyperthreaded). Otherwise
> shouldnt be a massive problem

At first, I also found this a bit confusing. But numactl --hardware was 
returning good information:

$numactl --hardware
available: 2 nodes (0-1)
node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
node 0 size: 16083 MB
node 0 free: 15803 MB
node 1 cpus: 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
node 1 size: 16125 MB
node 1 free: 8484 MB
node distances:
node   0   1
   0:  10  20
   1:  20  10

0-7 real cores of CPU #0, 16-23 hyperthreaded cores.

Cheers, Jan

> 
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 5:50 PM, Nicholas Sherlock
> <n.sherlock at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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/
>> [4]
>> 
>> 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
>>> [1]
>>> [2]
>>> 
>> 
> https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/12/17/apic-virtualization-performance-testing-and-iozone
>>> [2]
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> vfio-users mailing list
>>> vfio-users at redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users [3]
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> vfio-users mailing list
>> vfio-users at redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users [3]
> 
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [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
> [3] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
> [4]
> http://www.nicksherlock.com/2016/10/installing-macos-sierra-on-proxmox-4-3-qemu-2-6-1/
> _______________________________________________
> vfio-users mailing list
> vfio-users at redhat.com
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