GPU Sharing Between VMs and a Host

frog@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 43 points –

This seems like the final technology in containing and categorizing different PC uses into different virtual machines, while still having good feel even in contained things. If set up right you can have a seamless experience tabbing between a host system and virtual system, and you can do whatever you can normally do in either one! Wanna use linux, but Discord hardly works and you like to play Halo too much to figure out how to dodge it's anti-linuxcheat system? Now you can switch to linux and just run a single script to pull up a fully gaming capable (near bare metal performance) windows system right inside a linux system. Idk about y'all but as far as cool technology to talk about in here goes... this definitely fits for me. I feel like if more people knew this was something you could do relatively easily (if you enjoy tinkering with your OS) with MOST consumer Nvidia cards (20 series and older), Linux would've already passed 5%. What do y'all think about it? The ability to, off a single consumer CPU and GPU, host several acceptable, mid-performance, cloud accessible (or just virtually separate, locally accessible) PCs?

22

You are viewing a single comment

Can anyone tell me if GPU pass through is available for any of the mainstream VM tools like VirtualBox, VMware on ubuntu or windows host? Last I checked, it was not possible. Has anything changed?

You can not just pass through, but share any^1^ gpu you like using HyperV. Yes it's Win10Pro, but there are pleeeeenty of ways to get it enabled/installed/supported on Home as well. Though if you have an Nvidia card 20 series or older, and you're willing to dive into linux as a dual boot, I'd say qemu/virt-manager is a pretty mainstream VM solution, and vGPU is also a good tech for the same purpose.

~1~ I'm not actually sure what the limits on hyperv are but it seems fairly robust. Don't quote me on it lol