About time - PCI-E passthrough to VM guest

[ch_123]

Has anyone seen this?

Link

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.

[JBert]

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.

[ch_123]

Really? Im probably in the same boat then.

[ch_123]

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.

[Xuan]

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.

[JBert]

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...