NVIDIA GPU passthrough to Windows 10 guest with QEMU/KVM on Linux Mint 18

This is an example of how to passthrough an NVIDIA GPU to a virtual Windows 10 on Linux Mint 18.3 using QEMU/KVM with crackle free audio output and massively improved audio input delay.

• Hugepage memory backing for virtual memory tuning.
• VirtIO is used for storage and network for best performance.
• Intel HD graphics is used for host video.

Please note, that this is still work in progress, and some information is missing.

Hardware used in this example

• CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K
• RAM: 32 GB
• GPU: Gainward GTX 1070 8GB
• Motherboard: ASUS STRIX Z270F GAMING
• Storage: Intel 512GB SSD (storage pool)

Install QEMU and libvirt

todo

Configure libvirt

/etc/libvirt/qemu.conf

user = "1000"

Compile patched QEMU emulator with improved hda/pulseaudio

mkdir -p ~/src
git clone https://github.com/spheenik/qemu.git ~/src/qemu-spheenik
mkdir ~/src/qemu-spheenik/build && cd ~/src/qemu-spheenik/build
../configure --prefix=/opt/qemu-spheenik --python=/usr/bin/python2 --target-list=x86_64-softmmu --audio-drv-list=pa --disable-werror
make
sudo make install

Host configuration

Define CPU isolation kernel parameters

/etc/default/grub.d/isolate_cpus.conf

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT isolcpus=2,3,6,7"

Define intel_iommu kernel parameters

/etc/default/grub.d/intel_iommu.conf

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT intel_iommu=on"

Load KVM kernel modules

/etc/modules-load.d/kvm.conf

kvm
kvm_intel

Load VFIO kernel modules

/etc/modules-load.d/vfio.conf

vfio
vfio_pci
vfio_virqfd
vfio_iommu_type1

Blacklist closed and opensource nvidia drivers

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-video.conf

blacklist nouveau
blacklist nvidia

Define KVM kernel modules options

/etc/modprobe.d/kvm.conf

options kvm_intel nested=1

Define VFIO kernel modules options

Discover the video and audio IDs of the NVIDIA vga device using this command

lspci -nn | grep NVIDIA

/etc/modprobe.d/vfio.conf

options vfio-pci ids=10de:1b81,10de:10f0
options vfio_iommu_type1 allow_unsafe_interrupts=1

Allocate hugepages

/etc/sysctl.d/60-hugepages.conf

# Allocate 8192 HugePageTables (16GB)
vm.nr_hugepages = 8192

Regenerate grub configuration

sudo update-grub

Regenerate initramfs image

sudo update-initramfs -u

Windows 10 libvirt configuration

XML dump

Full libvirt domain XML domain xml