QEMU 1.5 Supports VGA Passthrough, Better USB 3.0

[phoronix]

Phoronix: QEMU 1.5 Supports VGA Passthrough, Better USB 3.0

Just three months after the exciting QEMU 1.4 release, QEMU 1.5 is now available with many exciting and new features for those using this open-source software in a virtualized world. There's the VFIO VGA pass-through support, USB 3.0 improvements, and much more...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM3NTk

[schmidtbag]

This is some very exciting news, it's a shame virtualbox has basically been left in the dust since in a usability perspective, that was my favorite free VM to use. Now that I recently got a 2nd GPU, I might try setting up a single-computer multiplayer gaming system.

[peppercats]

Is there anywhere I can read more about the VGA passthrough? It would be interesting to not have to dualboot windows to play games that WINE runs poorly/not at all.

[uid313]

VGA pass-thru performance?

How is the performance of running a Windows guest using VGA pass-through as oppose to running Windows natively on the host?

Would like to see some benchmarks.
Is gaming feasible?

[Andrecorreia]

great

best news ever , if this world finally i can erase windows for gaming on dual boot

[schmidtbag]

Just so everyone is aware, Xen has been VGA passthru compatible for over 2 years now. Xen may be considerably more difficult to set up, but we don't know if qemu will be any easier. After all, I'm pretty sure Xen is qemu based.


What really intrigues me about qemu though is it can virtualize other architectures. Imagine passing through a gtx 690 or a HD7990 to a MIPS VM haha.

[leech]

Just so everyone is aware, Xen has been VGA passthru compatible for over 2 years now. Xen may be considerably more difficult to set up, but we don't know if qemu will be any easier. After all, I'm pretty sure Xen is qemu based.


What really intrigues me about qemu though is it can virtualize other architectures. Imagine passing through a gtx 690 or a HD7990 to a MIPS VM haha.

Xen also only supports VGA passthrough with certain drivers / video card combinations, is a serious pain to set up (Under Arch Linux, it would just crash when I enabled the Xen bits).

Qemu-kvm is seriously cake to set up. I can pretty much do it in my sleep now. The one thing it was missing that Xen supported (very roughly) was VGA Passthrough. USB Redirection works awesomely through KVM as well, it's just missing Windows Client support (meaning I want to be able to redirect USB devices from the spicy client running on a Windows machine, to enable that device to be working on a remote Windows Guest). This works fine from the Linux Client.

I've been waiting eagerly for this day, that and QXL to get Gallium3D support. I'm installing Qemu 1.5 on Arch right now.

On a side note, I'm pretty sure Xen isn't based on Qemu, though I could be wrong. Qemu has been around forever, I think possibly the only thing really that Xen is using is possibly the seabios.

leech

[Chewi]

On a side note, I'm pretty sure Xen isn't based on Qemu, though I could be wrong. Qemu has been around forever, I think possibly the only thing really that Xen is using is possibly the seabios.

I didn't think so either but turns out there is at least some cross-over, though it may not be relevant to this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU#Xen-HVM

[mike4]

Hi
does this support fully 3D now? Could I run Windows or OSX on Ubuntu now with full 3D speed?
Any tutorial on how to use qemu around as I've only used Virtualbox so far. (which doesn't support hardware acceleration for guest os)
Thanks

[curaga]

Hi
does this support fully 3D now? Could I run Windows or OSX on Ubuntu now with full 3D speed?
Any tutorial on how to use qemu around as I've only used Virtualbox so far. (which doesn't support hardware acceleration for guest os)
Thanks

This is different. This is for when you have two graphics cards, and are dedicating one to the VM.