Behold, vm-curator! A fast and friendly VM management TUI written in Rust. You can create, configure, organize, and manage VMs directly with QEMU. No libvert. No XML. No wonky UI's. Just the right level of friendliness, customization, and speed to be really really useful.
The best part? 3D para-virtualization works with NVIDIA cards (via virtio-vga-gl!) No jumping through hoops to get GPU passthrough working!
(Disclaimer: This works great with other guest Linux VMs, but is not suitable for Windows gaming. If you want to game on Windows within a VM, passthrough is a must. vm-curator will have fast and friendly support soon.)
Looking for contributors (especially to help with the ascii art,) and donations are welcome. (Claude was a big help, but this was not a vibe-coded affair. We pair-programmed approx. 10,000 lines of code here. It was a great way to learn Rust, actually!)
What vm-curator provides is an easy way to use QEMU”s built in para-virtualization (virtio-vga-gl, a.k.a. virgl) in a manner that works with NVIDIA cards. This is not possible using libvirt based tools because of a bug between libvirt and NVIDIA’s Linux drivers.
Instead, for many profiles, it provides a link to the OS’s website (or archive.org) where you can download the installation media.
> IOMMU GPU passthrough with device selection would be a helpful feature: https://www.google.com/search?q=gpu+passthrough+qemu
rutabaga_gfx does GPU paravirtualization: https://github.com/magma-gpu/rutabaga_gfx
- VM creation with over 100 different OS profiles, built for KVM and emulation - 3D para-virtualization support using virtio-vga-gl (virgl) - UEFI and TPM support (auto-configured for OSes that need it, like Windows 11) - QCOWS2 Snapshot support. - USB Pass-through support and management.
There is also a rich metadata library with ascii art, descriptions of OSes, and fun-facts.
VM Creation with IOMMU will require the following for GPU pass-through: - a motherboard capable of proper IOMMU support. - 2+ GPUs, plus a dummy HDMI or DP1.4 plug for the passed-through GPU - Looking-Glass for display
VM-curator can host and manage other gpu-passthrough configurations, as the application supports editing each VM's launch script, but the above profile is what I'm planning to put into the creator system.
I have a TRX40 (Threadripper) motherboard, which will serve as an ample test-bed, but I still need to acquire a second GPU.
With the proprietary Nvidia Linux module,
These environment variables cause processes to run on an Nvidia dGPU instead of the iGPU: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/435.17/READ... :
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 \
__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia \
process-to-run-on-dGPU;
Bazzite has supergfxctl and the Nvidia modules installed in their OCI system images ("Native Containers"; ublue-os)
IIRC from (awhile ago) trying to run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough to the dGPU, a device selection gui would've helped
Arch wiki > Supergfxctl > 5.1 Using supergfxctl for GPU passthrough (VFIO) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Supergfxctl#Using_supergfxc...
Linux for ROG notebooks > VFIO dGPU Passthrough Guide > VM Creation Walkthrough: https://asus-linux.org/guides/vfio-guide/#vm-creation-walkth... ;
> After running this, the terminal will display a list of all your PCI devices, listed by their IOMMU group. Skim through the list until you find the IOMMU group that contains your dGPU.
But then under "selinux considerations" it says: https://asus-linux.org/guides/vfio-guide/#selinux-considerat... :
> /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf and find this line:
#security_default_confined = 1