Blacklisting Graphics Driver

Update September 14, 2021: This is a complete revamp, adding new, more robust methods and dropping outdated ones.

Update November 17, 2022: Kernel 6 seems to break the grub method.

When running a VM with GPU passthrough, that GPU should be bound to the VFIO driver. To make this happen, we need to prevent the regular graphics driver from binding to the passthrough GPU and instead bind the vfio-pci driver.

In the past we used to blacklist the graphics driver. This worked in most cases, but what if you need the graphics driver for another GPU, e.g. the host GPU?

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Tuning VM Disk Performance

Qemu/kvm provides you with a plethora of ways to configure your storage devices. Yet no other type of device shows such a variance in its performance, with disk I/O throughput anywhere from stellar to abysmal using the very same hardware.

In this post I like to show some configuration options that can help improve VM disk performance. For an in-depth presentation on the latest developments and features, with hands-on examples, see Storage Performance Tuning for FAST! Virtual Machines.

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