VFIO-enabler (name pending)

A project to simplify setting up GPU passthrough for QuickEMU and libvirt

Currently this project does NO MODIFICATIONS to your system, all it does is generate the files needed for testing inside ./config/ In a future version it will ask if you want changes applied to your system, however I am not enabling that until I have confirmation that this generates a working configuration for other systems than my own.

You can use it by simply running

git clone https://github.com/HikariKnight/VFIO-enabler.git
cd VFIO-enabler
./vfio-setup

Features

• General warning and info about what you will be needing
• Enable and configure vfio modules
• Configure 2nd GPU for GPU Passthrough
• Dump the selected GPU rom (as some cards require a romfile for passthrough to work), however no rom patching support planned.
• Enable and configure the correct kernel modules
• Provides you with the correct kernel arguments to add to your bootloader entry

Contributing

I know my bash skills are not great, so help is always welcome! And help is wanted here. If you know bash well, you will be able to help! Just make a pull request with your changes! Just remember to add comments to document the work and explain it for people who are less familiar with the bash syntax or anything else you use. 😄

Also if you know English, you can help by just proof reading. English is not my native language, plus I have dyslexia so I often make spelling mistakes. Proof reading is still contribution!

TODO

• Everything
• Show general warning to user and inform about making a backup and general expectations
• Detect if user has an amd or intel CPU and provide the correct IOMMU kernel args based on that
• Tell user to enable IOMMU (VT-d/AMD-v) on their motherboard and bootloader
• Integrate ls-iommu and locate graphic cards and see what IOMMU group they are in
• Enable and configure vfio modules
• Fetch the ID for the GPUs and generate the correct kernel arguments for grub and systemd-boot
• Dump the GPU rom, just in case it will be needed for passthrough (no rom patching planned due to complexity)
• Get help to actually make the scripts better
• A non-hacky menu system? (I will need help by some bash wizards for this)
• Coloured highlight/text for important information?
• Blacklist drivers? (some cards require blacklisting as softdep is not enough)
• Install vendor_reset kernel module? (maybe far future)
• Setup looking-glass? (far future maybe)

---

Why bash?

I wanted the dependencies to be minimal without the need for compilation and to avoid potential breaking changes in the future (like with the transition from python2 to python3).

I know enough bash to make things work, but I am in no way a professional in writing bash scripts as I usually write python and golang.

There is also quite a lot of perl usage as I am quite familiar with the perl regex format over something like sed