Preferred Hypervisor for GPU Passthrough

[imrazor]

I'm wondering what most people here use for GPU passthrough. I have an old Dell Precision workstation that I'm trying to turn into a gaming box/home lab for Linux & Windows learning.

 

I've tried VMWare ESXi and Proxmox KVM (based on Debian Linux) and got GPU passthrough working with both. Neither is perfect, but I'm leaning towards ESXi at the moment because I'm having so much trouble with audio on KVM. On KVM, I've got audio to the point that game audio plays OK, but Youtube has skipping and distortion problems when there's any background activity (downloads, disk transfers, etc.) Setting up GPU passthrough on KVM was also a good bit more painful than ESXi was.

 

That's not to say that ESXi doesn't have problems. I couldn't get USB hotplug working in my Windows VM, so I had to resort to task scheduler to force a USB scan every minute. I also had to find a super-secret config file parameter to prevent "Code 43" errors with my GeForce GPU. But audio work great, even when there's a lot of background activity.

 

Has anyone here had better experiences with their hypervisor of choice? Does Linus' favorite platform, Unraid, make it any easier to do passthrough?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, imrazor said:

old Dell Precision workstatio

what exact model?

 

What gpu? Does it support hardware virtulization(grid, tesla, some firepros)?

 

Unraid is just kvm, so it will be basically the same as proxmox. 

 

How are you doing audio? usb, gpu?

[imrazor]

It's the T5500 - really old, but I got it for pennies. The GPU in question is a Gigabyte 1050 Ti 4GB. I had to use different audio solutions for each hypervisor. ATM I don't have a long enough HDMI cable to reach my TV, but that can be remedied. In the meantime, I've had to use USB for ESXi (had to use a dedicated USB 2.0 card incl. K+M) but for KVM the best solution (a relative term) was to passthrough the T5500's onboard audio. I tried using an old PCI sound card, but there were way too many modules to blacklist.