Having gone this route in the past*, once I accepted that I needed a second GPU dedicated as owned by the VM, most issues went away. No SR-IOV battles, just the simplicity of "Linux owns GPU A, Windows VM owns GPU B".

If I am remembering my build from the time, I had an RX 580 for Linux, and a GTX 1070 as passthrough to the Windows VM. At first, it felt like I was "giving up" on solving some problem that felt like it should be solvable, but it worked so well that I couldn't argue with the results.

It also assumes you have a motherboard with the right slots and enough PCIe lanes to get the performance out of two GPUs, and assumes you have a PSU with the power budget to support both GPUs. It definitely was a compromise, not perfection.

*Approx 2017 to 2020, before Proton or when it was was still new/immature. I now no longer care enough about games to play one when it doesn't just work on Linux. I assume the author does not feel this way.

I had a stint with VM gaming over Christmas but gave up after wasting too much time trying to bypass anti-cheat detection. My desire came from security concerns; games have a massive attack surface and running them on bare metal makes me uncomfortable. I've always wanted an ephemeral Windows environment for gaming, but it's too much effort to make it work.

I run CachyOS on my gaming PC now and I'm pretty happy with it.

> GPU sharing with docker and VMs

This should work without needing a reboot. You do have to bind the vfio driver at boot, but the archwiki gives a script to unbind vfio and load the Nvidia driver: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Bi...

Which anecdotally worked fine on my RTX3050.

I did give up as well though, all of this is just too much of a faff. Hopefully Intel continues to make strides with their discrete graphics. They are the only manufacturer without DRM blocking this feature which the hardware can obviously do.

I use libvirt, vfio pci passthrough, evdev and some other stuff and have been smoothly VM gaming for a few years. Mostly just followed the arch wiki when I set it up back then.

I get throwing in the towel with all these issues but I personally didn't encounter half of them.

I finally just set up sunshine + moonlight and moved my big machine to the basement. Works great for non twitch games, and there are clients available for pretty much every platform.

> GPU sharing with docker and VMs

Yeah, we really live in age of Internet Explorer 6 yet.

We already have cool features in browsers, like transparent backgrounds, rounded borders, and even HTML 5 video elements, but we still cannot use VM intensively for any purpose with no hassle.

Maybe 10-50 years later we finally can use Linux laptop with RTX 5060, and just run a Call Of Duty multiplayer while a local LLM will fix bugs in our code.

I have a windows 11 VM under proxmox for gaming

- I bought windows 11 retail on a USB stick. (before the AI nonsense, etc)

- I run windows in a VM without a network interface. This eliminates SO MANY PROBLEMS. microsoft being problem #1

- I disabled all nonsense, windows defender was slightly harder

- I share a drive with linux (only one booted at once)

- linux runs lgogodownloader to load all my gog games onto the shared drive

- I install the games under windows from the shared drive

- someday I might change shared drive to virtiofs

- gpu passthrough

- I pass through an entire USB controller for audio, and plug in a USB schiit dac + headphones. passing the controller is key for glitchless audio

- some day maybe I'll figure out a steam VM. like maybe connect stuff once, download game for offline play, then take it off the network forever. Maybe have VMs for collections of games.

I also went down this path but for a different reason. Game streaming to my steam deck from my ultrawide monitor wasn't practical. The games on whales project is really good, it's not VM but rather containerized game sessions. It has numerous issues with podman sadly which is why I now use edvi and various scripts to just generate a fake monitor to stream.

Interesting article.

So for someone who is constrained to one PC, is dual booting the better option, or is there something else?

> UNSOLVED: GPU sharing with docker and VMs

Giving up because you can't solve 'cold fusion' is a common mistake, when we so focused on the problem and forget the goals

At some point is just cheaper to get a second cheaper GPU. Or use a CPU with integrated GPU

> GPU has to be bound to VFIO at boot

You can bind and unbind them at any time. There are several guides for people doing it with only 1 GPU

Just keep it simple

With an amd gpu, using virt-manager I can GPU/USB passthrough with just a few clicks and no command line needed

I also like gentoo QEMU guides https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GPU_passthrough_with_virt-manag...

The other day upgrading VM Win 10 nvidia drivers got a black screen, and was able to copy it as many times to install again other versions

Honestly, the future is probably going to be something like Amazon Luna, where you don’t run the game locally. Cloud streaming is going to be the norm unless we start pushing back.

I had a much better experience gaming on MacOS than I ever did using Linux + X (it was first dual boot with Windows, then double GPU + VM, then proton).

But it's mainly because I do not target anymore games with stringent anti-cheats or with high setup requirements (though the M5 is quite powerful right now), and a lot of games are ported natively to macOS but not Linux (most recent to date is Age of Empire 2 Definitive Edition 1 week ago).