My VFIO setup

NOTE

This is not maintained anymore. Gaming on Linux is very possible nowadays (see ProtonDB). I don't have Windows anymore. I will keep this Repo up so someone might find it some day, but I will no longer contribute anything.

Acknowledgements

This setup was made possible by:

• the ArchWiki, most notably these two pages: PCI passthrough via OVMF, QEMU
• YuriAlek, who has an amazing GitLab repository with everything. Especially the testing-auto branch is nice
• joeknock90's GitHub repository, thats where I have the part in my windows10.xml from

Hardware Setup

• i7 7700K
• Palit Super Jetstream GTX 1070
• 8GB RAM, 6GB of which are reserved for the VM at any time (yes I know that sounds and maybe is stupid)
• an entire SSD is passed to the VM

How-to

I basically followed the instructions in YuriAleks wiki and the ArchWiki, but here is what I did (approximately):

• first, I set up my host according to the steps described in Setting up IOMMU and Isolating GPU
• I set up my VM with virt-manager and installed windows in it (see ArchWiki -- VFIO)
• using virt-manager, I removed the SPICE display and other unnecessary stuff, and set it to pass through the GPU, a USB controller (which my mouse and keyboard are connected to) and my PCI sound card
• using virsh (virsh edit win10), I set up additional stuff unavailable in virt-manager (see README in libvirt folder)
  • important here: set the rom file for the GPU (see below)
• in the VM, installed the graphics driver and voila!
• important: in the libvirt folder, there is the .xml file and an explanation what I did. Read it, otherwise the performance will be crap

The GPU VBIOS

You need to provide a patched GPU VBIOS if you want to use the boot GPU for your VM. First, you need to extract the VBIOS:

• either you download one from techpowerup
  • some versions did not work for me, others did. Make sure to try a different version if it doesn't work
• you can extract the VBIOS with the extract-vbios-nvflash.sh script (see scripts folder) and nvflash (fromtechpowerup)
• if you run windows either in dualboot or in a VM with a dedicated GPU (like, the classical way), you can extract it with GPU-Z
  • I needed to set the kernel parameter 'kvm.ignore_msrs=1' in my host, otherwise launching GPU-Z would crash my system (see this reddit thread)

Then, you need to patch it. joeknock90 made a nice how-to for that. You can use the script he provides, or you can just use a hex-editor like bless and patch it manually. I patched it manually, it is very easy and probably quicker and safer.

File and folder explanations

• arch_vm.conf -- systemd-boot entry
• scripts/ -- well... launch scripts, helper scripts, environment variables
• libvirt/ -- the windows10.xml file, which contains all the configuration and an explanation what I did
• kodi/ -- Kodi addon to launch windows
• windows.desktop -- Nice desktop entry for GNOME
• windows.service -- Systemd unit file