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Comment by HansHamster | Hacker News Reader

> The whole process takes perhaps one or two hours and as works flawlessly, with no stability issues. Good joke, that really made me laugh :)

I tried this on my ASRock X370 Taichi a while back. Turns out that there is a bug in older bios versions and the whole thing just freezes when starting the QEMU VM. Then there is an intermediate bios version with which I actually managed to get it working. Unforunately I later upgraded my CPU and had to install a new bios and this again completely breaks the IOMMU groups. Probably spend a few days to get everything running, including downgrading from a non-downgradeable bios version.

And even when it was working it was a pain to use. Want to use the passthrough GPU in Linux? Now I have to dual-boot QEMU VMs or disable the passthrough, reboot, then enable it again, reboot one more...

I really want proper GPU virtualisation...

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> Good joke, that really made me laugh :)

I've been forwarding an AMD GPU to both Windows and macOS for literally years across multiple Asus motherboards and, except for the specific problem of host sleep/wake, had no problems whatsoever, even considering I work under GPU-passthrough VMs whole-day, every-day. Perhaps try a recent Asus motherboard?

> have to dual-boot QEMU VMs or disable the passthrough

Yes, you would have to buy as many cheap, secondary GPUs as the number of virtual machines that you want to run in parallel.

> I really want proper GPU virtualisation...

Sure, I don't blame you - my point was that the only truly usable GPU virtualization solution available today is GPU passthrough and that GPU passthrough is much easier to setup than it is commonly perceived.

> Perhaps try a recent Asus motherboard?

I also have an AM4 ASUS board (is that recent enough?) and earlier this year, ASUS decided to completely remove any mention of this board from their site, as if it never existed. So no bios updates for me I guess? No idea if it is up to date or not or if my CPU is even supported...

> Yes, you would have to buy as many cheap, secondary GPUs as the number of virtual machines that you want to run in parallel.

Except that cheap GPUs are... cheap and not very powerful, so depending on what I want to do I would have to buy a bunch of expensive and powerful GPUs (or go back to rebooting VMs to switch). And there are only so many PCIe slots on my board (2x8 and 1x4, the latter of which is already in use by a non-GPU card). Running them in an x1 slot also doesn't sound like a great idea.

I have tried to run it but gave up in the end after breaking bios updates and not wanting to spend even more money on another fast GPU.

> I (...) have an AM4 ASUS board

No, I never tried GPU passthrough with an AMD CPU, Intel only.

> earlier this year, ASUS decided to completely remove any mention of this board from their site, as if it never existed.

Maybe your board was only disappeared on some locales? Maybe see if you can find it on asus.cn or one of their other regional sites (translation service required, but you can probably muddle through)

I haven't seen that in a long time, amd640 super7 chipsets got disappeared, but back then you could still get the bios updates via ftp, the boards just dropped off the website.

> Perhaps try a recent Asus motherboard

And if I don't want to or can't afford to buy new hardware?

> Sure, I don't blame you - my point was that the only truly usable GPU virtualization solution available today is GPU passthrough and that GPU passthrough is much easier to setup than it is commonly perceived.

Okay, but for the poster you're replying to it is not available on their hardware.

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