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cyberquarks
Asked: 2018-03-26 01:24:25 +0800 CST

What is the difference of PCIe passthrough vs GPU passthrough?

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I recently found about this video link showing that ESXi is able to passthrough PCIe onto a Guest VM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhZzAjlNdWc

The question is, what is the difference of GPU passthrough vs PCIe passthrough does it mean PCIe passthrough can only be used on one Guest VM and GPU passthrough means multiple Guest VM can share a single GPU?

virtualization

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Pretty exactly, yes.

    PCIe passthrough means only the guest runs a driver for the hardware. The PCIe device is mapped into the guest's I/O space and cannot be shared with other guests.

    With GPU passthrough, a hardware driver runs on the hypervisor and guests share the single hardware through an abstraction driver (somewhat similar to a vNIC).

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