Can both the host and the guest use the hardware directly?

Green Dragon

I'm about to start experimenting with VT-d/PCI passthrough on new upcoming supported hardware, and was wondering if it's possible to use the video/audio hardware on both the host and guest OS, or if passing a piece of hardware to the guest means using it in the guest When the host will have to live without its hardware?

Ideally the host would be Linux (OpenSUSE) with KVM/QEMU backed virtualization, but if that gets me out of the way I can consider other OS/hypervisors.

Typical use case: Running a video game or audio sequencer in a Windows guest while still being able to watch video/play music on the host.

mubaibai

Do not.

Operating systems often expect complete and unique access to hardware. In order to pass the device directly to the guest, it needs to be released from the control of the host. There is currently no way to share devices between operating systems. For some reason it's listed as "through" rather than "shared", "arbitration" or other synonyms.

Typically, for graphics cards, that means you need one graphics card for the host and one for the guest. Using integrated graphics for the host usually allows you to pass a dedicated graphics card to the guest.

That doesn't mean you can't do what you want. If you have two powerful dedicated cards, you should be able to game on both the host and the guest . I'm not sure if it's possible to pass integrated graphics to the client (not sure that integrated graphics will hang on PCIe and shared memory will cause problems), so you may need two full fledged graphics cards to have serious graphics power. host and guest

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