Looks interesting but I think claims of VMetal in regards of gaming are kind of bullshit. I have been looking into running windows/Linux in VM and have it full access to GPU (GPU pass through) and there are 2 major problems.
Nvidia and amd being scummy and having firmware limiters in consumer GPUs to segment their products. This should be “fixable” by modifying firmware but … Yeah… Not very comfortable thing to do
Motherboards not having support or worse have broken implementation of iommu.
Maybe my “research” was bad. Let’s hope someone will correct me.
Not sure what firmware limiters you’re talking about? I’m using a cheap ASUS board (B450i-gaming), a Zen 2 CPU and a 6600 XT, and single GPU passthru works just fine for me on Arch using this guide. (I haven’t tried VMetal or this new release of Nitrux yet). Yes, some manufactures are iffy about IOMMU support, mostly Intel-CPU and Intel-based boards in my experience, but if you’re using AMD you should be fine.
There is something called an ACS override patch, but that’s a kernel patch not a GPU firmware patch, and from my understanding, that’s for dual-GPU users. Regardless, it doesn’t modify your firmware in any way.
Not sure what firmware limiters you’re talking about?
The same limitation mentioned it the guide you shared:
This solution basically hands over the GPU to guest OS upon booting the VM and hands it back to the host OS upon powering off the VM. The obvious downside of this is that you can’t use the host OS (at least graphically) while the guest is running. It is therefore highly recommended that you set up SSH access to your host OS just in case of issues.
Also thanks for sharing it. I will try it some other time. 🙂
Immutable in this context usually means the root filesystem is readonly at runtime, and all changes are performed by updating a set of declarative config files that describe the desired state of the system. Changes would be prepared and applied after a reboot. Something like that.
I will have to give it a try.
Ubuntu 23.04, Nvidia 3080, xorg. I would use Wayland but it doesn't work with steam at all for me at the moment. Maybe this update fixed it.
Might win me back over if the weird green lines and glitching I always see with chrome on intel GPUs under linux goes away. I've also spent a lot of time trying to debug the issue but nothing ever seems to fix it and of course none of the Linux driver devs that might be able to fix it care to work on the problem imo.
Guess I have felt lucky to have hardware decoding at all on chrome - considering the it has taken Firefox this long to support intel GPUs. I imagine it has something to do with how massive their codebase is compared to everyone elses.
Considering how good Firefox is, and how much of a monopoly that Chrome-based browsers have over the web, I'd run Firefox just to support freedom of choice.
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