jason_guy_yeah Posted June 8, 2015 Share Posted June 8, 2015 Would it be possible with a hybrid Intel/Nvidia GTX870M video card to have Linux isolated to the Intel video card and Windows use the Nvidia card...one the same monitor? I've seen a similar setup with a the Nvidia going to a external monitor using PCI passthrough in the VM (GTX870M seems to allow passthrough if it's tricked that it's not a virtual OS) The idea would let switching to the VM on a seperate workspace for games and also play with linux on the other workspace, also if 8.1 gets infected, I can load a snapshot vs. lossing my entire laptop; and help protect the BIOS and hardrive. Specs: MSI GT70 2PC VT-d enabled I7-4800 32 GB Ram KVM with Virtual Machine Manager Nividia GeForce GTX870M 3gb vram Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Enigma83 Posted June 8, 2015 Share Posted June 8, 2015 (edited) Is this by chance related to Optimus? If I'm not mistaken, in the case of Optimus all video is processed through the Intel graphics chip before being passed on to NVIDIA. So therefore both chips are inextricably linked to the other. VGA pass through maybe be an exception, I really can't help much in the way of advice. I'm posting mostly out of interest/curiosity more than anything else. This is the kind of thing I've long been interested in. The only thing that really keeps me tied to Windows is games. If I could play all my games in a Windows VM within Linux, while retaining near-native performance, I would probably never dualboot again. Edited June 8, 2015 by Enigma83 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_guy_yeah Posted June 8, 2015 Author Share Posted June 8, 2015 (edited) I wish but, optimus does a pci redirect that allows the OS to run another video card but it's still tied to one OS, in this case the host such as Mint, Arch, etc.. In this case, the host OS would have the Nvidia card blacklist in the Kernel so it won't grab the Bus ID, then the guest OS would "recognize" the unused graphics card. This would allow windows to load Nvidia drivers and run the Nvidia card directly, so there would be no overhead on virtualizing the video on top of linux. The only downside is linux can't use the Nvidia card. Linux tends to be effecient in ram and HDD allocation, with the combination of VT-d of the processor and Nvidia card I think that would make a very fast virtual machine. Edited June 10, 2015 by jason_guy_yeah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Funkypieman Posted September 15, 2015 Share Posted September 15, 2015 If it is optimus then you would not be able to use the built in display for one of the operating systems. However I've been thinking about passing the nvidia card and using steam in home streaming to access your games from Linux. Just a thought but worth figuring out Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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