Dedicated graphics card for Workstation VM?

KVM
1

Hi,

I’m thinking about buying a second graphics card to dedicate to my Whonix VM. I’ve tried both Virtio and QXL and am not really impressed by the performance as there is no 3D.

Ideally I’d like to use this for video playback, eg 1080p, 4k decoding, and maybe a little encoding with vulkan.

I read about vGPU and SRIOV support, but it seems only the AMD FireGL or Tesla cards support that. Intel apparently does, but I’m not sure how well.

I’m kind of thinking I want to steer clear of NVIDIA so I don’t have to worry about their annoying drivers inside my Whonix Workstation, so that leaves amdgpu or intel.

I was thinking something like a RX 7600 would work okay. Note I wouldn’t be sharing it with any other VMs.

Thoughts?

2

Interesting question but I doubt many people here will know.

The issue is unspecific to Whonix.

Therefore I would suggest to search if this was discussed elsewhere (most likely was) and redirect any questions to upstream KVM.

3

If you trust the content you will be running in the VM no problem otherwise you run the risk of advanced malware infiltrating the passed through card and then spreading to the system when it’s reattached to the host or another VM with a higher security level. The hardware parts of a modern computer are small computers themselves.

2 Likes
4

3D Graphics Acceleration not good enough?

1 Like
5

I hadn’t seen that page. Thanks for the tips though as this has been still on my to-do list to solve.