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geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: ch_123 on Fri, 08 January 2010, 18:37:48

Title: About time - PCI-E passthrough to VM guest
Post by: ch_123 on Fri, 08 January 2010, 18:37:48

Has anyone seen this?

Link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ia3IwG6tp4)

Of course, this means that you can now play games at full (well, almost full) speed inside a virtual machine. Would be great for Linux/Mac users as a less cumbersome alternative to dual booting.

Title: About time - PCI-E passthrough to VM guest
Post by: JBert on Sat, 09 January 2010, 15:15:35

Argh, seems I bought my AMD too soon...
Current AMD chipsets don't support this stuff yet (they miss an IOMMU, even though AMD had a spec around for a few years) so no hardware pass-through.

Title: About time - PCI-E passthrough to VM guest
Post by: ch_123 on Sat, 09 January 2010, 15:35:12

Really? Im probably in the same boat then.

Title: About time - PCI-E passthrough to VM guest
Post by: ch_123 on Sat, 09 January 2010, 15:41:04

Oh right. I thought you were referring to something other than just support for Virtualization extensions. I had heard that Intel's latest controllers have some fancy stuff to help it with virtualization, can't remember specifics though.

Title: About time - PCI-E passthrough to VM guest
Post by: Xuan on Sat, 09 January 2010, 17:18:30

That's what I've been waiting, just want to get rid of dual boot and wine sucks.

Shame AMD doesn't support it yet, I've been using AMD/ATI for many years and they always suck it hard when comes to linux support.
I'm gonna probably switch to a Intel/nvidia rig if this don't progress.

Title: About time - PCI-E passthrough to VM guest
Post by: JBert on Sun, 10 January 2010, 04:38:16

Well, the problem is that the IOMMU hardware needed for PCI-E passthrough is only implemented in AMD's 800-series chipsets, so this isn't about software or operating systems.

It seems they had a specification detailing its design for a couple of years. They only never got around to implementing it completely until recently (some motherboards have just been seen with an RD890 chipset), whereas Intel already has their implementation sitting in consumer boards as we speak (the guy in the video has such a board).

Be aware though that this extra hardware is only good if you want to quickly swap between two OSs. They are completely isolated, so no copy/pasting, no windows to be dragged between them...