Reboot unraid between "vm mode with gpu passthrough" and "plex docker with GPU"?

[TimoVerbrugghe]

Hi everybody,

 

Have a little project going on here with some questions. Have only 1 graphics card (GTX 1060) in my unraid system and with the shortage, won't be able to buy a new one anytime soon.

 

I use my unraid server both for a windows gaming vm with GPU passthrough AS using the plex docker with the nvidia driver for hardware transcoding. I know I can't do this at the same time. This is why by default, my graphics card is not bound to vfio-pci and it's being used by the plex container (I play around 1-2 times/week on my gaming vm)

 

If I want to use it for gaming, I need to do the following (and ofcourse vice versa if I want to switch back to plex)

 

1) Turn off autostart on my plex container and enable autostart on a "plex-nogpu" container (links to same appdata folder, has same config except no --runtime-nvidia and nvidia visible devices argument)

2) Bind graphics card to VFIO-PCI

3) Change CPU isolation to isolate 4 cores from my CPU for my VM

4) Enable autostart on windows VM

5) reboot my unraid server

 

I'm wondering if there is any way that I can automate this process (with a user script f.e., or using an api or something). Have noticed that:

 

- Binding of graphics cards is through vfio-pci.cfg on flash drive, so can write something to overwrite that file

- Isolating cpus is through syslinux/syslinux.cfg 

 

But autostart (for vm/docker) changes don't seem to affect the flash drive at all... so I'm wondering how unraid is storing this and keep it persistent across reboots?

EDIT: even when manually creating a symlink in the /etc/libvirt/qemu/autostart folder to my windows xml file does not change the autostart status in the web gui...

Edited September 16, 2021 by TimoVerbrugghe

[trurl]

You could just run the Windows version of Plex Media Server in your Windows VM.

[TimoVerbrugghe]

@trurl yeah true, technically that's a solution but not an ideal one. I don't use the windows vm that much so quite a lot of overhead for a plex server. Additionally, i'm using plugins to backup the plex appdata folder which won't be applicable anymore... 

 

So would rather have solution where I could switch between vm and docker... 

Edited September 17, 2021 by TimoVerbrugghe