Success story with NVIDIA GTX750 and GT610 passthrough

[Deadpan110]

I apologise if this is posted in the wrong place but felt the need to share with others my unRAID trial setup.

 

Ever since the early days of virtualization, I have always wanted to give my virtual machines their own dedicated GPU's but have always been held back by budget and digging around to find out tried and tested components (the money aspect becomes more of a problem when you are a stay at home dad with a very limited income).

 

As an avid long time Linux user with 8 of those years where my primary computing was on an Ubuntu Desktop, my Windows usage was practically non existent; but I do have some great Windows only games on Steam which I have to compete for playtime on due to my Daughter using the only Windows machine in the house for all her games.

 

I decided to try and build a system where I can have my Ubuntu Linux Desktop environment with Windows on another virtual machine purely for Windows only games and applications.

 

Then I stumbled on a Youtube vid for a virtualized gaming build using unRAID and had to try it for myself.

 

With my BIOS set to use on board graphics as primary and vt-x/vt-d activated, it was time to take the plunge.

 

Setting up my unRAID USB was fairly simple (although I was a little disheartened due to not having an easy way to make it bootable with 1 click on Linux - so had to use my daughters PC).

 

After creating 2 VM's (one for Windows 10 Pro and the other for Ubuntu 15.10), the biggest hurdle and the most time consuming part was trying to figure out passthrough. Sometimes I could get it to work and other times it would fail and freeze the system. With a lot of playing about and swapping the cards in the 2 PCIe sockets - it became quickly apparent that the NVIDIA GT610 simply did not like rebooting.

 

Testing the different cards for the Windows VM also had strange goings on - sometimes it would freeze the entire system when using either of the cards even though my Ubuntu VM didnt seem to care which one it used.

 

What finally worked for me was setting the Windows VM to Q35-2.3, Windows or Ubuntu were then happy on either card passed through and whichever VM used the NVIDIA GTX750 was now able to be rebooted without freezing.

 

Now I have my Ubuntu 15.10 VM with NVIDIA GT610 as my primary desktop and Windows 10 using the GTX750 running where I cant see it.

 

I use Steam in home streaming to play all my Windows games on my Ubuntu desktop! 

 

So whats next?

 

I want my unRAID key ASAP - yep, I love the trial version and plan to do a whole lot more with it.

I also want to replace the GT610 with a second GTX750 so I can reboot any VM using it.

I also want to write a plugin for unRAID too (I don't just play games).

 

Conclusion - superb and will be perfect once I get rid of the GT610

 

[tinglis1]

I had similar freezing results. Booting vm with my gtx750Ti when trying to use a 1440fx machine would lock the host up and have to do a hard reboot.

Some other things that I found the help my gaming vm was to isolate the cpu cores to for just the vm, this made a huge difference on windows 10.

 

I plan on writing a post about my vm success as well. Good to hear about your success.