Posted 12 August 2020 - 08:58 PM
@antonino61: Well, figure out what your mobo is. Then search around to see if it supports IOMMU and VT-d (if it's a mobo in a machine that has AMD CPU/GPU, these may be called something else). Boot into your BIOS, sniff around. Once you've confirmed these, determine if your GPU is suitable for passthrough, and has enough oomph to play the games you like. If your GPU is integrated with the CPU as one unit, forget it. Even if you could pass through an iGPU, performance will be crap. If you already have 2 dedicated GPUs, set aside the stronger one for the hypervisor and the weaker one for the host. As said, you can do this with one GPU, but it requires alot of scripting trickery, I havent tried it. It's also best if you have 2 monitors, I run the host on one and hypervisor on the other. Then you can control both OSes at the same time.
As for which Linux distro, it really doesnt matter, as long as it is relatively recent with a new-ish kernel. The availability of packages like KVM, QEMU, xen, and associated packages are important. And a reliable way to install/configure your Linux GPU drivers. I'm using Gentoo, so all my packages are customized for my hardware, and compiled from source code. Others have had sucess with Arch Linux, or variants of it like Manharo, which has a GUI setup wizard and easy to use package manager. I run other distros like Fedora and Debian too, along with Arch, but I havent tried this on those...it would probably work though.
It's also best to dedicate an entire disk to the hypervisor, for best performance. Should work with just 1 partition on a single disk, with the host controlling the rest. But then there can be I/O conflicts between the host and hypervisor. My hypervisor is using a Samsung 4TB SSD, it is just Windows 10, games, and torrent downloads, nothing else. i dont even bother to encrypt it like i normally would, since there is nothing secret/private on there that would be particularly interesting to anyone. Some of the games are legit and downloaded from platforms like Steam, others are pirated.