It consists of fixed base settings, some variable settings and several optional (mostly performance) settings. Unfortunately, the setup process can be pretty complex. Virtual machines with set up GPU passthrough can gain close to bare metal performance, which makes running games in a Windows virtual machine possible. Virtual Function I/O (or VFIO) allows a virtual machine (VM) direct access to a pci hardware resource, such as a graphics processing unit (GPU). Especially Fedora 26 should be easy to setup for passthrough (as recommended by level1techs). Most of the guides I found online were targeting either Fedora or Arch as the host operating system. I am still very happy with my distro choice (Xubuntu), but I have to emphasize that (X)Ubuntu (or any Debian based distro) is not the easiest distribution to perform virtual machine passthrough.

I updated the former guide regularly while optimizing performance and hardware 😉Ī newer version of this article, Ubuntu version 20.04 exists here.

The article is based on my last years guide, which used Ubuntu 16.04 as host system. The final system will run Xubuntu 18.04 as host operating system(OS), and Windows 10 as guest OS, considering gaming as main use-case of the guest. The intent of this document is to provide a complete, step-by-step guide on how to setup a virtual machine(VM) with graphics cards(GPU) passthrough – detailed enough that even Linux rookies are able to participate. Beginner friendly guide to windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough on Ubuntu 18.04 or how to play competitive games in a virtual machine.

Virtual windows on ubuntu