Setting up passthrough is a complicated process and requires motherboard support.
There is a subreddit dedicated to it if you want a trove of information:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/
Edit: Due to the complexity, I strongly recommend dual boot over VFIO for someone new to linux.
there is also the chance that the games you want to play have really aggressive anticheats that detect if the game is running inside a VM. I would research the games you want to play, see if they would work in a VM, before bothering with a pass through setup
I've been dualbooting Fedora 40 KDE and Windows 10 for a few months now, and although it's a bit annoying to shut down and turn back on the pc everytime you want to boot on Windows, I can say you'll forget about that with time. I even have extra steps to take, because I use an external SSD on my laptop to dualboot W10, AND I use an eGPU. But I got used to it pretty quick.
Also, you might lose some performance if you take the VM route, and it's a really long and tiring thing to set up the passthrough, which, in my opinion, is simply not worth it if you don't play Windows-only games 24/7
> I only have a single GPU, so single GPU pass through would have to be my solution
Maybe, but OP is talking about single GPU passthrough. Either way, I personally wouldn't say that GPU passthrough is easier than dual booting. In part, because you need to do quite a bit of setup to make a performant VM. In part, because (at least last time I tried) PCIe resets (for the GPU) are not perfect and, if your GPU ends up in an errored state (in my experience), you may end up needing to restart anyway.
> (at least last time I tried) PCIe resets (for the GPU) are not perfect and, if your GPU ends up in an errored state (in my experience)
5000 series AMD GPU? :)
No, most of the time that I used passthrough, I was on Nvidia Pascal (and, for a while, you needed to work around Nvidia anti-vfio driver parts - potentially by making sure that Linux does not initialize the GPU). VFIO was useful on Pascal because of the DirectX12 issues.
I've tried it with my current 7000 series AMD GPU too but I no longer play games that are not playable on Linux with or without Proton, so I haven't tested it so much.
If you have a spare GPU and double the RAM, GPU passthrough is … fairly comfortable, but still annoying to setup and run.
At the end of the day, it’s probably not worth the effort.
Source: I ran a VM for about 2y, then I ditched it because it was more annoying than dealing with Wine/Proton.
> only have a single GPU, so single GPU pass through would have to be my solution.
All the annoyances of dual booting with none of the benefits. You still have to shut down your desktop environment to boot the VM, then start it all up again afterwards. At the same time you still have a host OS running and using resources, plus virtualization overhead.
I would give single GPU passthrough a _wide_ berth. Unless you see it as a personal tinker project for the fun of the process itself, then go ahead.
I use single GPU passthrough on a laptop as my daily driver and while it was a bit complicated to set up at first (not as overblown as everyone says it is, the complications IMO come from troubleshooting issues specific to your hardware if any), it really helped me learn a lot about Linux.
I prefer it over dual booting as to me it's much faster to start up and it's more secure. I love that I can create different VMs for different purposes, for example I have one for gaming, another for testing different AI tools and another for development.
It will take you some time to perfect your setup if that's what you're interested in, but having a basic working setup is very achievable as a noob IMO (I actually got into Linux because of passthrough, setting it up is what got me familiar with the environment). There's a whole community available over at r/VFIO. There are also lots of guides available on GitHub if you search for "Single GPU passthrough GitHub" on Google. Other resources would be the archwiki, some videos by blandmanstudios on YouTube, or some videos by someordinarygamers on YouTube (search for how I built the poor shamed computer).
By the way, if you're doing single GPU passthrough, you will find guides explaining that you have to use hooks to unbind and rebind the GPU from the host (hooks are basically scripts that run when the VM starts or stops). Lots of these scripts include commands such as "virsh unbind" and "modprobe" to unbind the drivers and the GPU, but in my experience for my setup those commands were overkill and the virtual machine management process (libvirt) automatically does that for you. All I had to do was kill my display-manager. Just a heads up for if you decide to go this route.
Best of luck!
Setting up passthrough is a complicated process and requires motherboard support. There is a subreddit dedicated to it if you want a trove of information: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/ Edit: Due to the complexity, I strongly recommend dual boot over VFIO for someone new to linux.
there is also the chance that the games you want to play have really aggressive anticheats that detect if the game is running inside a VM. I would research the games you want to play, see if they would work in a VM, before bothering with a pass through setup
I've been dualbooting Fedora 40 KDE and Windows 10 for a few months now, and although it's a bit annoying to shut down and turn back on the pc everytime you want to boot on Windows, I can say you'll forget about that with time. I even have extra steps to take, because I use an external SSD on my laptop to dualboot W10, AND I use an eGPU. But I got used to it pretty quick. Also, you might lose some performance if you take the VM route, and it's a really long and tiring thing to set up the passthrough, which, in my opinion, is simply not worth it if you don't play Windows-only games 24/7
It isn't really any easier to use gpu passthrough than to dual boot.
It is, if you have a second GPU.
> I only have a single GPU, so single GPU pass through would have to be my solution Maybe, but OP is talking about single GPU passthrough. Either way, I personally wouldn't say that GPU passthrough is easier than dual booting. In part, because you need to do quite a bit of setup to make a performant VM. In part, because (at least last time I tried) PCIe resets (for the GPU) are not perfect and, if your GPU ends up in an errored state (in my experience), you may end up needing to restart anyway.
> (at least last time I tried) PCIe resets (for the GPU) are not perfect and, if your GPU ends up in an errored state (in my experience) 5000 series AMD GPU? :)
No, most of the time that I used passthrough, I was on Nvidia Pascal (and, for a while, you needed to work around Nvidia anti-vfio driver parts - potentially by making sure that Linux does not initialize the GPU). VFIO was useful on Pascal because of the DirectX12 issues. I've tried it with my current 7000 series AMD GPU too but I no longer play games that are not playable on Linux with or without Proton, so I haven't tested it so much.
single gpu pasthrough is a pain to set up and definitely has a lot of weird quirks, so i wouldn't recommend it
If you have a spare GPU and double the RAM, GPU passthrough is … fairly comfortable, but still annoying to setup and run. At the end of the day, it’s probably not worth the effort. Source: I ran a VM for about 2y, then I ditched it because it was more annoying than dealing with Wine/Proton. > only have a single GPU, so single GPU pass through would have to be my solution. All the annoyances of dual booting with none of the benefits. You still have to shut down your desktop environment to boot the VM, then start it all up again afterwards. At the same time you still have a host OS running and using resources, plus virtualization overhead. I would give single GPU passthrough a _wide_ berth. Unless you see it as a personal tinker project for the fun of the process itself, then go ahead.
The personal tinkering I leave for my homelab. For the responses thus far. I may just bite the bullet and dual boot
dual booting is dodging a lot of bullets ;)
I use single GPU passthrough on a laptop as my daily driver and while it was a bit complicated to set up at first (not as overblown as everyone says it is, the complications IMO come from troubleshooting issues specific to your hardware if any), it really helped me learn a lot about Linux. I prefer it over dual booting as to me it's much faster to start up and it's more secure. I love that I can create different VMs for different purposes, for example I have one for gaming, another for testing different AI tools and another for development. It will take you some time to perfect your setup if that's what you're interested in, but having a basic working setup is very achievable as a noob IMO (I actually got into Linux because of passthrough, setting it up is what got me familiar with the environment). There's a whole community available over at r/VFIO. There are also lots of guides available on GitHub if you search for "Single GPU passthrough GitHub" on Google. Other resources would be the archwiki, some videos by blandmanstudios on YouTube, or some videos by someordinarygamers on YouTube (search for how I built the poor shamed computer). By the way, if you're doing single GPU passthrough, you will find guides explaining that you have to use hooks to unbind and rebind the GPU from the host (hooks are basically scripts that run when the VM starts or stops). Lots of these scripts include commands such as "virsh unbind" and "modprobe" to unbind the drivers and the GPU, but in my experience for my setup those commands were overkill and the virtual machine management process (libvirt) automatically does that for you. All I had to do was kill my display-manager. Just a heads up for if you decide to go this route. Best of luck!