For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:

  • a few gaming VMs
  • a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
  • an LLM server
  • a Stable Diffusion server
  • media server

Just to name a few possibilities…

Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.

So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?

  • @[email protected]English
    3•5 months ago

    I’ve recently tried to do that using sunsine and different linux gaming distros and it was awful, the VM was working great for a few minutes and then suddenly crashes and I have to hard stop it.

    Are you running this with something like libvirtd/qemu? If so, VFIO configurations can get pretty complex. Random crashes seem like MSI interrupt issues (or you’ve allocated too much RAM to the guest). Or it could be GPU reset issues that would also occur on the (Linux) host, a newer kernel and Mesa version in the guest may help.

    Setting on the kernel commandline for the host to workaround MSR interrupt crashes:

    kvm.ignore_msrs=1

    If you’re running on a Windows host or with something like Virtualbox (assuming GPU passthrough is supported by these), YMMV but I wouldn’t expect good results.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•5 months ago

      I’m using Proxmox with an NVIDIA 1050 GPU that I was passing through to another VM for jellyfin transcoding in docker (I don’t need it anymore), because of that I thought that the drivers were set up correctly.

      The guest was Bazzite with 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM, I was not even gaming, just login on steam and updating the system and I had sudden crashes with Bazzite only using 1 GB on the Summary…

      • @[email protected]English
        2•5 months ago

        Ah Nvidia. Bazzite uses Wayland I believe since it uses the same gamescope session as SteamOS (unless something has changed recently). While it may be possible to get it working, I’d expect a much better time with an AMD card.

        A traditional distribution may be a better bet with Nvidia for now.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•5 months ago

          Thanks, I’ve also tried to change the autologin with x11 with no success, I’ll try with nobara, but I really liked the console-like features