Bad ideas and becoming a warden
I have always been annoyed with the direction game companies have been going and have tried to make VFIO work for me. I’ve had some success but its fiddly so I have been looking to be less fiddly.
Looking at the interface around proxmox and how much you can leverage under the hood, since you know its Debian+KVM+LXC with a face and some makeup, I decided to go and fiddle with it to create in essence a jail on this super beefy VFIO box I have. I am going to try and stuff every workstation on it into its own VM, my main systems will have GPUs passed through to it.
What I have in my head right now is the host will have Proxmox. The host will have a NVME disk assigned to it and use ZFS. It is a Ryzen 9 3950x with 64GB of ram 3 NVME disks in it, 2 network interface cards (a 2.5gbps and a 1gbps card) a couple add-on USB controllers, build on an Auorus Master wireless board of some type I forget exactly but it was suited for this task and has isolated IOMMU groups.
Inside the host there will be 2 VMs,
- one will be a linux VM with an Intel ARC GPU and USB controller passed through to it.
- The other VM for this test will be a Windows 11 VM with a Nvidia RTX 3060, USB controller, and 1 NVME disks passed through to it.
There may be other VMs down the line but I want to make the test as simple as I can. There is a bunch of potential here especially for some basic low hanging fruit isolation, yes I know on x86 virtualization isn’t really isolation blah blah blah, and a bit more ability to use this giant beefy box and reconfigure its ability to do what I need on the fly. I will keep some notes and post a lot more about it as I go.