Can anyone explain what are the hardware requirments for virtualizasion with GPU pci passthrough, both on an Intel system and an AMD one?

As for Intel, I don't understand the difference between vt-d and vt-x.

As for iommu - what is it? AMD only?

 

Both for KVM and XEN.

Thanks in advance

vt-x is hardware virtualization support.    AMD's equivalent is AMD-v

 

vt-d is virtualization support for directed-I/O  ... i.e. support for I/O pass-through  (what you want to do).  The AMD's iommu provides this same capability.

 

As long as you have a system that supports both vt-x and vt-d, and a motherboard that supports hardware virtualization (almost all modern motherboards do) ... then you can do what you want to do.

 

I'm not aware of ANY Haswell-based motherboard that doesn't have this support ... so if you use a Haswell Core i5 or Core i7 you won't have any issues.

 

 

 

 

Thanks a lot.

Are these hardware req. relevant both for XEN and KVM?

Suggesting putting this info as sticky...

vt-d is only required if you need to do pass-through.

 

vt-x provides hardware virtualization support ... but is not required for all hypervisors.  I don't use either Xen or KVM so I'm not sure whether they require this or not.  I seem to recall that one of them does NOT ... but I don't recall which one.  I suspect someone who uses them will comment on whether or not vt-x is absolutely required.