[Pkg-libvirt-discuss] video/GPU passthrough, second monitor, shared keyboard/mouse

[Nigel Kukard]

Hi Daniel,

On Wednesday 29 July 2015 15:11:04 Daniel Pocock wrote:

>I'm looking at a setup that involves a Debian host and a non-Linux VM
>under KVM, on a workstation for a power-user.

I know exactly how you feel :)


>The non-Linux VM would have a dedicated video card/GPU, to maximize
>compatibility and performance for certain applications.

This is EXACTLY what I am doing right now. Well, similar, I don't use the host machine, but here is nothing stopping me from using it for Gnome/KDE. I did this when testing and fiddling around.

I have a cheap NV card as my primary, and a very expensive NV card as the VM's GPU.

I then have a USB3 PCI-e card, which is assigned to the VM aswell. I have a 7 port USDB3 AC powered hub plugged into it for all my devices.


>It may be possible to interact with the VM using SPICE but it is
>possible to just have a second monitor for it too.

I am not sure you can do this when you use the hardware GPU. I may very well be wrong but would love to hear if you get SPICE + GPU working.


>So my questions are:

>- When using an independent video card for the VM, how to share the
>keyboard and mouse between the host and the VM?  E.g. should I just use
>Synergy or x2vnc or is there a nicer solution with KVM or qemu?

I could never find a usable solution for this, especially in the environment I am in (corporate, productive, reliability).

I've tried Synergy and ran it for at least 20 months or so, the end result had me chuck it out.

A KVM switch couldn't work for me as I have 2 monitors and a keyboard that at the time required special software.

When setting up what I did was just assign the keyboard and mouse to the VM, so when the VM started the keyboard and mouse were removed from the host. You could hotplug it back to the host, and hot plug it back to the VM.


>
>- are any other free software solutions (e.g. VirtualBox, Xen) likely to
>be better or worse for such a project?

I could not get the same reliability or a better result using VMWare or Virtualbox. Libvirt + KVM while it took me a great deal of days to get it working is something I will never ever turn back on.

I have full 3D support in my VM with dual monitors, 9 USB devices including HD webcam I use for training, and a headless Debian machine (just with the cheapo NV card plugged without a screen plugged onto it).

-N
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