vga-passthrough VS Simple-Ubuntu-Setup-For-Gaming

I've been using VFIO and maintaining a guide for a few years, then I've realized that VFIO kinda works, but it's not a reliable technolog, and I switched to dual boot.

There are very significant pain points, specifically:

1. if one reserves the video card for VFIO, it won't have any power management; this means that it will run hot while doing nothing; in order to work this around:

1a. first one has to battle with X, which has an option not-to-take-over-a-card-but-it-takes-it-over-nonetheless

1b. then one can give exclusive access to the graphic card driver, which then can be switched out/in when starting/stopping the VM; this unfortunately works, but not reliably

2. the points before apply to nvidia; AMD is worse, as it hasn't supported soft GPU reset until very recently (I think it was added on 5.19 or so)

2a. this means that one starts the VM, then stops it, and most of the times the card will hang

2b. there resize BAR functionality is not supported by VFIO (at least, last year it wasn't), which meant, one had to lose performance by virtualizing it

The problem is that all the points below are not in control of the user; the problems happen at driver level (if there is no reset support, one can't add it out of thin air).

Point 1 has been what lead me to abandon VFIO. It's fantastic, but finding that my card was running hot while doing nothing was really a showstopper; and the alternative of the card having a most-of-the-time-malfunctiong driver was not appealing, either.

Big shame! I loved VFIO :)

* https://github.com/64kramsystem/vga-passthrough

I mantain a guide for setting up VFIO (https://github.com/saveriomiroddi/vga-passthrough), which I frequently use.

My conclusion is: for machines that are compatible with it, VFIO works very well. The technology itself is stable, so working on photoshop/game development etc. (from a technological perspective, there's no distinction between the two tasks) is not distinguishable from working on native.

I had VFIO on 4 machines I think, and one had problems which I couldn't solve, while the others worked well.

When used with QEMU, it requires some system settings and QEMU flags etc., but it's straightforward.

To put it in another way: if one wants to use VFIO seriously, it's best using hardware known to work well, rather trying to cram VFIO on a not very compatible ones.

And also: one needs to be pratical. An USB soundcard solves countless hours of attempts to use the host's Pulseaudio system (meh).