Can T430 use VT-d passthrough to the nVidia GPU for client OS for 3D applications?

The T430 thankfully uses the more full-fledged QM77 chipset and not the bare-bones HM77 chipset, and when paired with a CPU that also supports VT-d, it should be able to pass through PCI(e) devices from the host machine to the guest OS in virtualization software that support it.

My question is that has anyone done this with the NVidia Quadro GPU in the T430? My plan is to run Linux as the bare host, and then run Windows in the VM with the NVidia GPU assigned to the guest OS to do periodic 3D work in Windows that cannot be done in Linux.

I've look around and the closest I've come is a thread discussing this for desktops:
Full 3d Gaming in virtualization - Graphics Cards - Graphics & Displays

It seems like the verdict is that NVidia GPU's are "near impossible" to use VT-d to perform pass-through with, but I'm wondering if this is true for the Quadro line in the Thinkpads.

Thanks for anyone that has any info regarding this!

 

I've done video card pass through in esx but only with amd cards in a desktop. I will be trying this on my next laptop as a small, power efficient esx host. I have never heard of anyone doing this with an nvidia card.

 

That's what I feared, and that's also what I gathered. It seems like NVidia cards won't work with ESX, and with lots of patching and hacking, it can be made to work with Xen (supposedly...)

What's the specs of the laptop you'll be attempting this on?

 

None of the NVIDIA laptop GPUs can be passed through unfortunately. There's actually no problem with the actual passthrough of the GPU. It's the drivers that have problems when loading inside a VM. The only way to passthrough a non-desktop-Quadro NVIDIA card is with a patched version of Xen, a Windows XP 32bit guest, and the 275.33 drivers. You're lucky if that guest can reboot and still work Desktop Quadro cards can be passed through (literally) by clicking some buttons in virt-manager.

Just for the record this is what you would need to do for GPU (or any PCI) passthrough, if NVIDIA ever made it work:

Disable the Firewire port in the BIOS and recompile your distro's kernel without the DMAR disabling patch for Ricoh devices (or else the kernel will panic).

For Xen:

Compile Xen from git with these patches: Xen 4.2.unstable: Patches/Notes for VGA Pass Through and NVIDIA - Le blog de Jean David TECHER, un Réunionnais à Saint-Priest/Lyon for GPU passthrough. PCI passthrough requires no modifications.

For KVM:

Compile qemu from git. The latest kernel from git would probably be useful too. PCI passthrough will work with the distro provided versions of KVM.

EDIT: By the way, almost all ATI/AMD GPUs can by passed through with any hypervisor.

EDIT2: Also, be very careful if you are going to try this. On my W520, after attempting to pass through the GPU, the BIOS (NVRAM?) got corrupted in such a way that Linux kernel panicked on suspend and Windows blue screened on boot. Luckily, yanking out the CMOS battery saved the system

 

very useful info, but it frightens me when you say the nvram got corrupted.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend trying GPU passthrough. I don't know if you have any use for it, but regular PCI passthrough works perfectly. It's useful if you want to pass through your wireless card to Backtrack/Kali Linux for example.

 

On my desktop, I've passed through video card, raid card, usb ports etc so I can use my esx host also as an experimental vm that outputs video/aduio that you can interface with a mouse/keyboard/external usb audio/usb bluetooth and has ok video. The console on the vsphere client is too slow and rdp is ok but still a little slow. I've been busy with other stuff but it's very fascinating because it's not all that useful now but I see it being prevalent in the future. A san or ssd's are too expensive, but passing raid or sata through gives me very good performance with TBs of data.

 

To say it CLEAR no intel-laptop supports vt-d, since no intel-laptop-motherboard supports vt-d!!!!!!!

 

Both the QM67 and QM77 chipsets in the Thinkpads support VT-D:

ARK | Mobile Intel® QM67 Express Chipset (Intel® BD82QM67 PCH)
ARK | Mobile Intel® QM77 Express Chipset (Intel® BD82QM77 PCH)

I've successfully passed through the USB 3 controller to a guest OS as a test.

 

On another note, KVM can successfully pass through many AMD and NVIDIA cards now. The support is not in a stable release yet, so you'll need to compile a few packages from source. As far as I know, this is the only method to reliably pass through a laptop GPU

Instructions (for Arch Linux): https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768&p=1