alpine-kvm

Alpine-based KVM/QEMU host configuration and virt-install scripts

Prerequisites

• A fresh install of Alpine Linux 3.20 (Extended) using 'sys' or 'cryptsys'
• Intel CPU
• Two GPUs (one for passthrough, one for host)
• A working internet connection

What do I do

After a fresh install of Alpine, you can curl/wget the configure-alpine.sh and run it on your system.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sureshjoshi/alpine-kvm/main/configure-alpine.sh
# Read through and closely examine the code in this file before running it
sh ./configure-alpine.sh

It is an interactive script which will best-effort setup your system as a QEMU/KVM host, allowing GPU passthrough to a Windows (or other) virtual machine.

The Alpine/Intel requirements are not necessarily dealbreakers, but this version of the script was only tested using those conditions. For example, this script could probably be modified for AMD by changing intel_iommu to amd_iommu in the configuration script, but that's untested.

Additionally, this script could theoretically work on a single-GPU system, but it would likely require some modifications and debugging/troubleshooting would be more difficult as this script binds the GPU at boot time, rather than on-demand (which a single-GPU system should prefer).

System Info

Here is the setup I run this on:

CPU: 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13600K
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z790I Aorus Ultra
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060

And these are the installed software versions:

cat /etc/alpine-release 
# 3.20.1

qemu-system-x86_64 --version
# QEMU emulator version 9.0.1

libvirtd --version
# libvirtd (libvirt) 10.3.0

virt-install --version
# 4.1.0

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later

See LICENSE to see the full text.