Can I mine from a virtual machine Ubuntu while using my 6990's hardware?

[kloinko1n]

Well, the title should say (ask) it already. But, here is the replay:
Is it possible to set up a virtual machine with for instance Ubuntu and run the 6990 hardware on that?
Thanks for your answers.

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[3phase]

No, VMs have virtual graphics cards, they don't have access to the physical cards. Any miner software running would tell you that there is no card.

[kloinko1n]

No, VMs have virtual graphics cards, they don't have access to the physical cards. Any miner software running would tell you that there is no card.

Bummer...
Looks like I have to run my VM's on the mining OS then.
Thanks anyway.

[Sideways]

This is mostly true .. in newer versions of Xen there is options for PCI passthrough, where it maps the physical device to a specific VM. So it is possible, but not very easy, and I wouldn't count on it not taking the whole box down if something went wrong.

[3phase]

This is mostly true .. in newer versions of Xen there is options for PCI passthrough, where it maps the physical device to a specific VM. So it is possible, but not very easy, and I wouldn't count on it not taking the whole box down if something went wrong.

True, but this is hardly a workable solution since any PCI drivers can fail in the VM for a number of reasons with this. The Amazon EC2 cloud (which runs a modified Xen) offers physical machines, not VMs, for GPU cluster rental (see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/). If there was a way to slice GPU power within VMs, I would think Amazon would have done that.

Bummer...
Looks like I have to run my VM's on the mining OS then.
Thanks anyway.

Yes indeed, in fact I've done it and it works fine. Since GPU mining does not really impact the CPU and the memory, I have set up a machine running Ubuntu, a miner and VMWare player with my Windows Server as a VM (before the whole physical machine was dedicated to the Windows Server).

[error]

This is mostly true .. in newer versions of Xen there is options for PCI passthrough, where it maps the physical device to a specific VM. So it is possible, but not very easy, and I wouldn't count on it not taking the whole box down if something went wrong.

Last time I looked, PCI passthrough didn't work with GPUs.

[padrino]

This is mostly true .. in newer versions of Xen there is options for PCI passthrough, where it maps the physical device to a specific VM. So it is possible, but not very easy, and I wouldn't count on it not taking the whole box down if something went wrong.

Last time I looked, PCI passthrough didn't work with GPUs.

It works fine, parallels even sells their Extreme Workstation product specifically for the task. You do however need to make sure your chipset supports VT-d (Intel) or IOMMU (AMD) for hardware level support of direct IO.

[kloinko1n]

This is mostly true .. in newer versions of Xen there is options for PCI passthrough, where it maps the physical device to a specific VM. So it is possible, but not very easy, and I wouldn't count on it not taking the whole box down if something went wrong.

Last time I looked, PCI passthrough didn't work with GPUs.

It works fine, parallels even sells their Extreme Workstation product specifically for the task. You do however need to make sure your chipset supports VT-d (Intel) or IOMMU (AMD) for hardware level support of direct IO.

Thanks! I'm sure I will be able to try this out with the help of this guide.