r/VFIO

Hi everyone,

I'm thinking about switching my laptop to Linux as my primary OS for software development and using a Windows VM with single-GPU passthrough only for Adobe Creative Cloud.

My main workflow would be:

• Python development
• Docker/containers
• Virtual machines
• AI/ML projects
• General software development

Windows would only be used for Adobe apps like Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Gaming is a nice bonus, but it's not my main priority.

Laptop specs:

• Lenovo LOQ 15ARP9 (83JC0045IN / 83JC00EGIN)
• AMD Ryzen 7 7435HS
• NVIDIA RTX 4050 Laptop GPU (single GPU, no iGPU)
• 24 GB DDR5 RAM

A few questions:

• Has anyone successfully done single-GPU passthrough on this laptop or a similar Lenovo LOQ?
• Does the RTX 4050 reset properly after shutting down the VM?
• Are there any laptop-specific issues or firmware limitations I should know about?
• If you've done something similar, which distro would you recommend (Fedora, EndeavourOS, Arch, etc.)?

Any advice or experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hi there lovely people.

I have been pulling my hair for the past 4 days. I am here asking for suggestions and a possible fix.

The vm (win 11) works and it runs as expected with the gpu passed through, installed amd gpu drivers on windows and all happy. Now, when i shutdown the vm, and try to rebinds the 9070 xt to the linux host to get my desktop back, it kind of rebinds to the amdgpu drivers but there is no display and nothing, the kernel messages that the amdgpu crashes. I cannot even reboot using the command line, I have to hard reset the pc with the powerbutton.

I do manual unbinding and rebinding of the gpu drivers and managed is off in the vm xml. I aslo echo the rebar to 8 tried with 3 as well but same results and also tried forcing d0 state... nothing helped.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks.

Update: I give up, dual booting it is... till this stupid damn bug gets fixed

I'm asking cuz i (like most of you) i refuse to have windows on my pc bare-metal, Was wonderingg if its possible..

Man, I gotta say, I’m really bummed by the research I’ve uncovered the past week or so.

To make a long story short, I recently had the idea to make a “jack of all trades“ proxmox server, tasked with tackling all my home compute needs: 24/7 services like immich, jellyfin, and Tailscale, tinker with some local llms and ai, and of course, gaming. It was going to be a home server consolidating three machines into one lean, power-efficient beast—I was so pumped to build it and set it up.

However, after reading the countless posts about blocked vm gaming protocols by anti-cheat companies like EAC and BattleEye, its greatly diminished my desire to build my dream machine. I play multiple games that probably just wouldn‘t work in a vm, Elden Ring, Halo, Destiny, Arc Raiders.

I guess I’m just making this post to hear from others if there is any light at the end of the tunnel or something to hope for.

I remembered that previously you can bypass EAC of both these two games by adding <smbios mode="host"/> to your Libvirt XML.

But it no longer works after Nightreign's update yesterday. Then I tried regular Elden Ring and it didn't work too.

If anyone can still play Elden Ring (and/or Nightreign) in a VFIO VM now, could you tell me what modification did you add to your Libvirt XML of the VFIO VM? Thanks!

(For now I can still play these games by dual booting, so not exactly a dealbreaker, but its still very annoying)

i tried everything ;/

Recently, my PC died. I had an idea, that it's motherboard, and bought ASUS Prime X670E-PRO WiFi. Finallly, I figured out, it's not motherboard, it's CPU (ryzen 7 7800X3D) - I made things work with another CPU.

Also, I find out, iommu groups of this ASUS are far from perfect.

Tl;dr: Without ACS patch, you can passthrough only first GPU. The second is together with 2.5g network, one of two sata controllers

GPU installed in the first PCIe slot, external USB controller in the second PCIe:

https://pastebin.com/G5HJDJdq

GPU installed in the third slot:

https://pastebin.com/tECQqtpJ

>!I'm going to send this mobo to amazon back, as well as open RMA ticket for CPU - cpu died after 2.5 years, and AMD let you open RMA during first 3 years of your CPU.!<

>!Mobo, where CPU died, is ASRock X670E PG Lightning. Looks like it's known problem, related to a bad bios. And AMD replaces CPU in this case (I hope it will replace my one...). When I tried to fix this problem, I already updated bios to the latest version, which ASRock provides.!<

So long story short, had this vm for about a 2 years, can’t even remember most of the relevant things about it

Used to play halo, worked fine, stopped for a while and updated to pve 9.2 and now halo says it’s a vm

Im assuming the update is the culprit unless something was done during my time away, Ive havent touched it in a few months

Any help would be greatly appreciated