Troubleshooting – Known issues, bugs and common quirks of KVM QEMU virtual machines with gpu passthrough

Hardware Error “Unknown PCI header type ‘127’ “ Attention! The ASUS Prime x370/x470/x570 pro BIOS versions for AMD RYZEN 3000-series support (version 4602 – version 5220), will break a PCI passthrough setup. Error “Unknown PCI header type ‘127’“. BIOS versions up to (and including) 4406, 2019/03/11 are working. BIOS versions from (and including) 5406, 2019/11/25 […]

Beginner friendly guide to windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough on Ubuntu 18.04; or how to play competitive games in a virtual machine.

Preamble The intent of this document is to provide a complete, step-by-step guide on how to setup a virtual machine(VM) with graphics cards(GPU) passthrough – detailed enough that even Linux rookies are able to participate. The final system will run Xubuntu 18.04 as host operating system(OS), and Windows 10 as guest OS, considering gaming as […]

Comprehensive guide to performance optimizations for gaming on virtual machines with KVM/QEMU and PCI passthrough

Preamble This guide describes performance optimizations for gaming on a virtual machine (VM) with GPU passthrough. In order to optimize the user experience for virtualized gaming, I started to pursue low latency and high performance. Especially since my main focus are demanding online multiplayer games. The Benchmarking Process I started benchmarking several setups (found on […]