this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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I did the vfio passthrough years ago, rocking two monitors like I always have.
Top monitor was Linux only via Display Port. Bottom was Linux via HDMI, and Windows via DP. Small cheap AMD GPU for all the Linux, and big boy AMD GPU was only for Windows VM.
I would turn on the VM, and then toggle my bottom monitor from HDMI to DP to game, and then the reverse when finished. Could be done all the same without the top monitor.
A neat trick I figured out, was the Windows VM was actually a bare metal Windows install on a separate SSD that could be booted into normally, but also passed through to the VM when using Linux.
Which hypervisor? I tried booting a physical install this year with VirtualBox and two decades ago with VMWare Player and both times ended up with damaged bootloader that was unable to boot from bare metal
My memory isn't the best on this, as it was close to 10 years ago, I just now had to look up some YouTube's and images to see which things I recognized.
I was using Arch and pretty sure I managed everything with Virtual Machine Manager.
I know 100% I used vfio, and I wanna say qemu as well.
The one thing I remember most, was I couldn't use Virt Manager's GUI to just straight up add the Windows SSD. I had to use the GUI to add something similar, but then had to go and directly edit the XML. It took me forever through trial and error, but I wanna say I finally was like fuck it, and changed the XML entry to just straight up /dev/nvme and it worked.
Never had any bootloader issues. I think I let Windows have its own EFI boot partition it installs automatically, but also gave my arch install its own EFI boot partition as well. When I wanted to boot Windows bare metal, I would just press F8 on boot and select the Windows Boot manager entry, as opposed to booting into systemd-boot and selecting Arch or Windows.