KVM-OSX on Notebook, GPU Passthrough for Cuda

Hey there,

long time MBP user here (on the mobile side of computing), but its time to say goodbye to Apple (hardware). Price is one reason, the other is the poor performance of the Radeon Pro 560 that Apple builds into their (top of the line) Macbooks. As a desktop machine i have a Hackintosh since 2009, so i am generally aware of the pitfalls and methods to get a hackintosh running.

Anything video related is my field of work: Editing, Color Correction, Compositing, Transcoding etc. pp. so GPU Computing power is one of the most important factors for choosing a new notebook.

For my next Notebook am still undecided between the Razer Blade for its GTX 1060 and the newly announced Asus Zenbook UX550 with a GTX 1050Ti. I´d prefer the GTX 1060 for its cuda computing capabilities but i guess i would be OK with the 1050ti, if the zenbook will be a lot cheaper than the Razer Blade. As you can see here, even the 1050Ti is almost twice as fast as the Radeon Pro 560 used used in the 3000+ Euro Macbook Pro (https://compubench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=compu20d&did1=49835192&os1=Windows&api1=cl&hwtype1=dGPU&hwname1=AMD+Radeon+RX+560+Series&D2=NVIDIA+GeForce+GTX+1050+Ti). The GTX1060 would be roughly 1/3 faster even than the 1050ti.

Traditionally, both machines would be a no-go for Hackintosh use, because of several reasons, the Killer AC1535 Wifi Chip only being one of it, the biggest being NVIDIA Optimus switching technology, so i guess the idea of directly installing OSX on either machine would be a lost cause.

I have been following these pages recently:

https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~somlo/OSXKVM/

So a scenario for me would be using a slim linux distro (i.e. Lubuntu) for everyday office stuff and firing up the OSX VM for multimedia work.

There are a couple of things i still dont understand yet, so maybe somebody can enlighten me:

• On my desktop hackintosh i experimentally installed sierra in a KVM (on a Lubuntu Hypervisor). The look and feel was very sluggish, although benchmarks ran at OK speed. Is this due to VNC / Spice as the method of displaying the Guests graphics? Is VNC vs. Spice a significant difference? Do other virtualizing softwares like virtualbox, vmware or xen offer better solutions for this?

• GPU Passthrough: The problem when using GPU Passthrough seems to be (on Notebooks) that the Guest (with a dedicated GPU assigned / passed through) outputs its graphics through that dGPU´s physical connectors. On a laptop, there is (usually) no physical output connector for the discreet GPU, so they are copying the screen to the framebuffer of the internal GPU - which seems not possible between Host and Guest when running a VM. So this could actually be the dealbreaker in terms of a OSX-VM Macbook Pro ... BUT ... i guess for GUI purposes the internal GPU would be fine for me as long as the discreet GPU could be still used for CUDA computing... Is this possible?

any tips appreciated. t.