Windows in VM with GPU passtrough

[pcm81]

I am currently running linux mint. There are couple windows programs that wine and mono are not handling well and I would like to run them in windows7 virtual machine. I created a VM in OrcleVM virtualbox, but found experience unpleasant, because the virtual machine can not access my GPUs, so the grafix look crappy. Is it possible to pass to the windows OS in VM my 2x 6990s as well as my sound blaster live? I'd like to run windows in VM sandbox under linux, rather than dual boot.

Thanks ahead

 

[sbpromania]

Have you tried another Hypervisor, such as VMWare?

 

[Bryf50]

Install virt-manager and use KVM.

 

[paperwastage]

did you install the VirtualBox Guest Additions?

what sort of graphics issues do you see? incorrect/accurate color info, or just laggy/choppy/slow performance in 3D/graphics applications?

on my host (Ubuntu) + Virtualbox, I see options of enabling 3D+2D acceleration on my windows guests VMs, and assign up to 256MB (of my 4GB R9 390 GPU)

 

[TheRyuu]

In order to pass through a graphics card your computer would have to support VT-d which I don't think is available on an older CPU like yours (i7-980X). Anything that gets passed through with VT-d would not be available to use on the host system so even if your system did support VT-d you'd only be able to use one of the two 6990's from the guest system.

 

[Crusty]

In order to pass through a graphics card your computer would have to support VT-d which I don't think is available on an older CPU like yours (i7-980X). Anything that gets passed through with VT-d would not be available to use on the host system so even if your system did support VT-d you'd only be able to use one of the two 6990's from the guest system.

That's kind of surprising that CPU doesn't support VT-d. Some of the previous generation Core2Quad chips supported it with the right chipsets.

 

[paperwastage]

That's kind of surprising that CPU doesn't support VT-d. Some of the previous generation Core2Quad chips supported it with the right chipsets.

price segmentation

for sandybridge and above, a lot of the "k" parts (unlocked multipler) don't support VT-d, need to go down to a locked multiplier chip to get VT-d (or xeon)

 

[AnonymouseUser]

That's kind of surprising that CPU doesn't support VT-d. Some of the previous generation Core2Quad chips supported it with the right chipsets.

I have a 3570K that doesn't support VT-d, yet non-K i5's do support VT-d (newer i5 K's do also). I would like to do the same with GPU-passthrough and can't with my Intel setup, but I could do it with my with my Phenom II X6 or FX-4100...

 

[pcm81]

Thank you all for the replies. It does kind of suck that a $1,000 CPU does not support VT-d... I was trying to avoid dual booting, but it looks like ill have to seek other means than VM... I was hoping to run photoshop in windows vm but without correct radeon 6990 driver inside the VM the colour rendering is no where near good enough to even think about color profiling the monitor...

 

[PingSpike]

If you don't have vt-d I don't think the issue is having the correct radeon driver inside the VM. Without that feature there is no way for the VM to talk directly to that card. You're probably just using the virtualized video card in that case and playing with the options in the VM and installing the guest additions might be able to resolve the photoshop problem.

Virtualbox does have experimental support for pci device passthrough on linux hosts last time I checked, its using KVM I believe with the latest releases. But I never found any guides about getting it going.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

If you can afford a $1K video card then don't cheap out and dual-boot. Instead, just buy a boot SSD and leave the original one intact.