{Guide} Create a Gaming Virtual Machine - Page 3

It's good to see nvidia devices are listed on separate lines -- the same as ATI. That means the guest should not require the onboard audio to be passed through. I saw that one proposed patch actually broke ATI functionality in favor of nvidia. Another thing I read was that they had to be passed as primary video devices. That would mean installing the OS to the domU then redoing the config file as I stated before -- nographic=1. I also heard that the patch tries to load the video bios from the card, so that might be the real issue.

Let me know if the patch works and I will include it in my first beta release.

This is really not the easiest solution for what you want. This keeps the entire operating system in a virtual machine and needs special instructions to get full performance. What you are doing by using sandboxie is just creating a logical volume on a hard disk that is protected. This gude has less to do with keeping windows lean than it does with running multiple OSes on one box simultaneously.

I think steam is just drag-and-drop with games and there is a manager program somewhere on OCN that helps with it. There also might be a wayt o link steam to the other drive. That's not really my area of expertise, but I am sure someone here can help you. Thanks for checking out my guide

I hear that the earlier cards like the geforce 8000 series work well, but some of the newer cards have issues. I think the best bet is a normal VM install then delete the VM and recreate with nographic=1 in the configuration file. It made Windows 8 work and the passed video card was set as the primary video card. If it does not work, stay tuned for a patched version that will boot from a USB drive.

The system I am using right now uses UEFI and there have not been any problems. I do not need to edit my Grub configuration at all other than adding iommu=1 to the Xen multiboot line.... wait did I forget to mention that in the guide? I thought I did. Anyway, I did not need to do anything special for the latest version of the guide to work properly. UEFI included. Are you using the most recent Hypervisor (4.1.2) and do you have the right packages installed? I am using libvirt as a workaround for hot-unplugging PCI devices that can then be passed to the guest.

About the PS/2 keyboard -- I really do not know the status of those devices with passthrough, but I know that USB 1.1 passthrough is possible without VT-d or IOMMU. Glad to hear Synergy is working just fine though!

About NAT -- I have been working on this issue for my next revision of the guide, but I am currently using a custom bridge and disabling the NetworkManager service. This lets the VMs be registered just the like host. I will most likely include a script in the next version, or a hotfix for now. NAT did work for the VMs, but they were assigned incompatible addresses and not all functions worked properly. Steam and Web browsing did Eventually this will all be handled by the USB boot drive --- that is when I can figure out how to get a proper Grub2 boot menu on a live-cd image.

It is AWESOME that this is working for you too. Thanks so much for reading and reporting. What are your specific UEFI specs and boot settings?

yep
Edited by dizzy4 - 4/6/12 at 10:06pm

I do not believe your motherboard supports VT-d, so you would need a different one before attempting this. If I had a larger system (not ITX) I would try it for myself. Currently I am not able to get my iGPU passed through to a guest, but it does work on the dom0 while the radeon powers one VM at a time.