[vfio-users] Xeon E5-2670 + ASRock Rack EP2C602

[Zachary Boley]

I run 2 Xeon 5540s currently with my passthrough build, nothing fancy just
a normal Windows 10 VM with passthrough and everything seems setup real
well (had to switch to RAW instead of qcow2). Other than the occasional
audio scratch up it runs pretty much like windows would normally run. My
only question im still struggling with is making sure I pinned the correct
cpu cores (physical not hyperthreaded). Otherwise shouldnt be a massive
problem



On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 5:50 PM, Nicholas Sherlock <n.sherlock at gmail.com>
wrote:

> That is the precise hardware configuration I'm running, with macOS Sierra
> and Windows 10 guests. I pass through an R9 280X to Windows, and a GeForce
> GTX 750 Ti to macOS without issues. macOS doesn't play nice with the R9
> 280X if booting using SeaBIOS, triggering host freezes on boot, but these
> problems go away under UEFI. I'm not much of a gamer, and I don't have any
> game benchmarks on bare metal, but games seem to play okay on the guest for
> me. I have a couple of blog posts here about it, using Proxmox/KVM as the
> hypervisor:
>
> http://www.nicksherlock.com/2016/10/installing-macos-
> sierra-on-proxmox-4-3-qemu-2-6-1/
>
> I also pass through two of the onboard USB controllers and a NVMe SSD to
> macOS. macOS seems to struggle a bit with sending audio through USB, with
> dropouts every few hours requiring the USB audio to be replugged, but this
> might just be the USB audio chipset. SSD performance is significantly
> reduced in my macOS guest compared to the host, which I'm assuming is a
> performance limitation of this early CPU. Host achieves 74,000 random 4kB
> reads per second, while guest only sees 33,000. I haven't played around
> with that enough to pin down the cause.
>
> Cheers,
> Nicholas Sherlock
>
> On 5 November 2016 at 02:56, Jan Wiele <jan at wiele.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>> inspired by [1] and in need of a new computer, I settled with the idea to
>> get
>> 2x Xeon E5-2670 and an ASRock Rack EP2C602.
>>
>> Its main purpose is to provide 2-3 (mediocre) gaming VMs with (Nvidia)
>> GPU-
>> passthrough. Before I buy these parts, I have some questions:
>>
>> * Has anyone experience with this hardware configuration? Especially
>> regarding
>> VFIO.
>> * How does missing APIC-V impact the gaming performance? [2] shows little
>> improvements in IO scenarios.
>> * Is there better hardware with the same value? The Mainboard + 2 CPUs
>> will
>> cost me around 500€.
>>
>> For the future, I hope that games can utilize more CPU cores and that
>> Vulkan/
>> DX12 with less API overhead, makes more space for the actual game.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jan
>>
>> [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/2016-May/msg00122.html
>> [2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/12/17/apic-virtu
>> alization-performance-testing-and-iozone
>>
>>
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>
>
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