this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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I'm genuinely curious, why does VB continue to somehow remain in use, when it's lacking in features, or behind in usability, in basically every way imaginable? If you're on a Linux host, you have plenty of 1-click solutions that are incomprehensibly better than this. On Windows, Hyper-V boxes aren't horribly difficult to get running either, although from my experience, they require the same janky and hacky patches as VB does
In boxes there is a toggle that is labeled "3D acceleration" if you flip the toggle your VM will have GPU acceleration.
That's not GPU passthrough. That just enables VirGL, which is a translation layer that passes some OpenGL calls through to the host's Mesa installation. It has rather poor performance though, it's extremely limited and is rather buggy too. You certainly can't use it for cutting edge gaming.
GPU passthrough is when you pass through an entire GPU device as-is to the virtual machine. That is: if you have an Nvidia RTX 3060, the guest operating system will see an Nvidia RTX 3060 and it can use the native drivers for it. This gives you near-native performance for gaming.
Now, I didn't even know this was possible with VirtualBox (if so: cool!), but it's certainly doable with KVM if you have the right motherboard and GPU combination. I have done it, but it is quite the hassle indeed though that isn't really KVM's fault.
It does work with AMD GPUs too, I did it with an RX6800XT myself, but there are some (most...) AMD GPUs that have a reset bug which means they hang if you reboot the guest and you need to powercycle the physical host machine to make the GPU usable for the guest again.
To get basic GPU passthrough working, I mainly followed the Arch Linux guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
Be warned though that this is just the start of the journey. There are all kinds of issues that you need to deal with and decisions that you need to make if you want to practically use it for gaming, and those require lots of googling, piecing bits of information together from all over the place, and trial and error. From memory these are things I had to deal with:
For more information, there's the /r/VFIO subreddit. Yeah I know, f*** reddit, but it has a lot of useful information. The looking glass site has some FAQs too, even on things not directly related to looking-glass itself. There is some VFIO discussion on the level one forums as well, but they're not so active.
Anyway if all this sounds like a cool project to spend a few weeks on, I heartily recommend you try it. I sure enjoyed setting this all up and getting it working, but I spent way more time configuring and troubleshooting things than I did gaming with that setup, and in the end I decided that just gaming on Proton and occasionally dual booting for problematic games is a much more practical solution.
I do what your describing (its called vfio) and it works pretty well on Proxmox.
What are the other solutions?
Virt-manager
Does it still need to reboot the guest in order to connect an USB device?
No
I don't think it ever did?
You never did, as long as you pass the entire USB controller. I'm not sure if they made changes here since then
Even if you pass just the device, or if you use spice pass through.
Vm manager, gnome boxes
Boxes
Hyper-V is not really better than Virtualbox on Windows. Virtualbox will run anywhere and that is its strength.
On Linux, you should use KVM. I assume that's what your advocating for.
How share folder host-guest without network access? Last time try need to use samba (did not get working) and then impossible to turn off vm network access. Used qemu for win 10 guest.
VB just install guest addition and disable network interface.