Hi there!
I have two GPUs. I’d like to pass one to VM to have it windowed. My goal is to have Manjaro (host) with GPU1 and Win10 with GPU2 with OpenGL enabled ina Window, so I can switch to it if I need it.
Do you know if this is possible?
Hello,
Have you tried this PCI passthrough via OVMF - ArchWiki ?
Should be straight forward, but you can lay out where you get stuck, someone will assist you for sure.
I’ve seen this page before but just now I’ve found out the “looking glass” solution.
Seems like this is it.
Is this the only method?
(I’m going to pass GTX 1050Ti)
You cannot control one screen from two GPU at the same time. The screen will be using either one of the GPU, but not both.
The idea of GPU passthrough is that your VM gets its very own GPU. This provides next to native performance, as the VM accesses the GPU directly using its own drivers.
You can switch the screen inputs from host to VM and back, though. Or use two separate screens, one for the host, one for the VM.
Looking glass is a program that kinda captures the VM screen and outputs it on the host, frame by frame. In other words, it streams the graphics output of the VM GPU to the host. The website linked above provides more info.
If you have one screen with multiple inputs (like me), and the screen has a button or another way to switch between inputs, then you can do without Looking Glass. Unless you have a specific need for Looking Glass, it might be better to do VGA passthrough the traditional way.
I’ve written a few tutorials on VGA passthrough, perhaps they help:
Passing through a Nvidia RTX 2070 Super GPU
I’m not sure your GTX 1050 Ti requires you to pass along a VBIOS file. Most older Nvidia cards don’t require that step, but the newer ones do (see Nvidia RTX 2070 … for how to prepare the VBIOS).
You’ll find plenty of links to more resources and tutorials. I got also some posts on useful hardware for VGA passthrough. I’ve been running Windows in a passthrough VM for the last 10 years and would never want to go back to dual booting, or worse, only Windows (cry weep cry). I use my Windows VM for photo and video editing - trust me, that’s a heavy workload.
Good luck!