How can I give my only VGA controller to a virtual machine?

Question

So I have Linux host which is my main OS and a Windows guest OS which I use for doing my Windows work.

Sometimes I would like to play an old game (which I'm sure can run on my integrated GPU) or have a snappier experience when using Visual Studio. So I would give they only VGA controller in the machine to VM.

In order to achieve that I would like to do the following (probably in a script).

• Stop everything locks the VGA driver.
• Unload the VGA driver. (at this point the host no longer outputs image).
• Passthrough the device to the Windows VM.
• Start the VM. (VM's image should show up the screen).
• Use the VM.
• When done, shutdown the VM.
• Restore everything on the Linux host.
• Restart X.

Is it possible to achieve this? Anyone did this before? If yes, how?

Currently I'm using VirtualBox but I'm willing to switch to other virtualization systems if it's easier to do this on that.

The problem is that all tutorials and guides are dealing with 2 monitor, 2 GPU case, which is different from what I want.

Answer 1

Generally this should be possible, although I'm not sure if this is possible with integrated graphics.

• On VirtualBox this is possible chapter 9 paragraph 9.6

• KVM supports device passthrough.

• VMware ESXi supports PCIe passthrough, although you would need a second device to use it properly.

• Qemu also supprts PCIe passthrough

I don't know if Virtualbox, VMware and Quemu support device passthrough instead of 'only' PCIe passthrough. Please check if your hardware supports device/PCIe passthrough.