Greetings -
I saw Andrew Holway's post yesterday referencing using PCI passthrough as a solution to someone else's issue. Not being familiar with it, the post made me look into it more to see if it is something to use for my setup. From my research on the web, I have two questions to make sure I understand how PCI passthrough works.
1. If you use PCI passthrough on a graphics card to allow a virtual guest direct access to the graphics card for it use, does the host still have use of the graphics card also?
2. Or, once you pass it to the guest, the host can then no longer use it and has to rely on base level motherboard graphics? It looks from my reading that using PCI passthrough you can make the graphics card available to multiple guest simultaneously, but it seemed to imply that the host could no longer use it.
With the box that I am configuring, I was planning on installing Linux Mint (Cinnamon Desktop) as my kvm host, then installing Win7 as a virtual guest. Since I use some mapping software in Win7 it would be nice to be able to use the graphics card via PCI passthrough, but not at the expense of loosing it from the Mint Cinnamon Desktop. However if multiple kvm guests can use the graphics card simultaneously (but the host can not), the maybe I should use CentOS as a very basic host and then make both Mint and Win7 guests.
Jeff Boyce Meridian Environmental