Basically the title. I’ve only ever seen huge 20 page guides on how to make it work. Is there an easy way?
Specifically on Debian or Arch with a laptop with two gpus (zephyrus g14)
It’s not… easy but it’s also not 20 pages difficult, unless you wanna do sinlge GPU passtrough, then that’s black magic.
Here is the guide I used when setting it up
This along with the arch wiki’s page on GPU passtrough should be enough to get you setup
E: Pro tip - pay close attention to section 2.3 Gotchas in the arch wiki, this sh!t had me stuck for a while on my system
Easy way to get yourself banned in online games just an FYI. Most online games will detect and ban virtual machines now since they’ve become commonplace in cheat/hack communities.
I have the 2020 G14 and I got this working once. I’m afraid easy and simple are not a thing here, as you need to understand what you’re doing if you want it to work well. The basics are:
- Prevent the host system from loading any drivers that touch the discrete GPU. This is done by attaching it to the VFIO driver and uninstalling/blacklisting the Nvidia and Nouveau drivers.
- Make sure you have the correct kernel parameters to support virtualisation and PCI-e passthrough.
- Create a Windows VM and attach the Nvidia GPU to it.
- Setup Looking Glass so you can play with the best possible latency. This will likely require a dummy USB-C display stick.
Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the hassle. I keep a Windows install for when it’s needed, and do most of my gaming on a separate system.
If there’s a game that doesn’t work on Linux because of anti or something it probably won’t work in a vm either so dual booting would probably be the way to go to avoid that
Does it have to be a VM? Is Steam or Lutris not an option?
VMWare Workstation Pro is now free and I believe that it had GPU passthrough. Don’t take my word on that though. I haven’t used it in a few versions.
I also don’t know if there’s any Linux program that will automatically do the configuration for you.
It seems like it would be pretty complex since I guess you need to disable the linux host from using the GPU, and do PCI passthrough in a VM that has Windows installed.
And there’s still the problem of the graphics needing to move around the system in order to get to the display instead of the display being directly connected to the GPU.
Seems like a pretty cool thing that would be neat to have a nice automated GUI solution for.
I was just looking at, seems like it’s difficult but not impossible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTWf5D092VY
I’m in the same boat that it seems too difficult (and I bet the performance still isn’t near native).
I just dual boot and boot into Windows if I’m going to play a game.
