1.3.5 Hardware Passthrough

This chapter will discuss on how to pass through different devices to your virtual machines. That is you will give your VM direct access to the hardware instead of via a virtualization layer. This is extremely hand for passing through HDD for a TrueNas VM for instance and a GPU for a media or machine learning VM.

Now, hardware passthrough really means that only one VM can use the piece of hardware you are passing through. Yes, there are occasions where this is not the case but these are most of the time expensive pieces of technology such as GPU's that can virtually split up its VRAM to multiple containers. A solution however is to use LXC containers instead of VM's or have all your applications running inside the same VM. We will discuss both in this chapter