Tag: kvm

Unraid VM USB Hot Plug

Posted on by Evan Laske
Windows Device Manager with USB Devices
USB Controllers in a Windows VM

Once you have basic GPU passthrough configured, you can get near bare-metal performance in a VM on Unraid using KVM under the hood. However, one thing that is a little awkward are USB devices. The host, in this case Unraid, owns, initializes, and configures USB devices by default. This gets even more complicated when you consider that Unraid boots off a USB device rather than another drive in the system.

Here we’ll look at how you can get close to hot-plugging USB devices into a VM. In a future post we’ll take it a step further to get near-baremetal functionality just like we did with the GPU.

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unRAID Pascal GPU Passthrough

Posted on by Evan Laske

I decided recently to move on from my Synology NAS as the core storage / server device in my network infrastructure. I have re-purposed my previous gaming machine to become a heavier-duty server. There will be more to come on this setup later. I chose unRAID because I wanted it to also serve dual-duty as a living room gaming machine. One of the major advantages of unRAID is that it provides a good front-end to KVM virtualization under the hood. In order to enable nearly bare-metal performance on a VM, you have to direct-pass through a GPU to the VM. However, as we find this is not straightforward with nVidia cards.

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