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Comment by gnatolf | Hacker News Reader

What's the progress, or who's behind a virtio layer for windows? Any hope that this will work in the foreseeable future?

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There's mature VirtIO drivers for just about everything already, under the virtio-win umbrella: https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows

My desktop PC is using libvirt+qemu (on an Arch host. I use Arch, btw) to PCI passthru my RTX 4090 GPU to a Windows guest. I installed the guest initially with emulated SATA for the main drive. Once Windows was up and running, I installed virtio-win and the guest is now using virtIO accelerated drivers for the network interface + main disk. I'm also sharing some filesystems using virtio-fs.

Did you have to use any hacks to get a regular GTX/RTX card to pass through? Last time I tried this with ESXi, it was insanely difficult and poorly documented to get non-Quadro cards to do pass thru (admittedly on a Windows guest).

NVIDIA changed this in 2021: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5173/~/g...

Thanks; that was after I tried to make things work and gave up.

Do you mean windows using virtio? Then the answer would be red hat and since many years ago:

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_VirtIO_Drivers

(oh and to answer the other part of your question: I believe Red Hat contribute a lot to virtio-win)

Thanks. I'm sorry if my question wasn't particularly complex to answer ; - )

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