Bare Metal stability vs PCIe passthrough
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Help settle a discussion for me.  On our server, we've tested out setting up a VM with QEMU/KVM and using Virt Manager to pass GPUs to it. So hashcat is running in the VM and the bare metal OS doesn't do much at all. The benefit is that when there's an update or driver issue, we can just revert the VM and keep going.  And surprisingly, the resource usage is minimal.  In fact in some tests, the cracking output in the VM is faster than on bare metal. (We think that's do to a different OS and driver optimizations in the VM.) Overall it works really well, but adds some complexity.  

Here's the question.  One of our guys is convinced that hashcat is extremely instable and that on the bare metal it crashes for him all the time & requires a reboot. So the VM simplifies that.  I haven't seen that instability or heard complaints from others. His suggestion is that everyone's just used to it & reboots their server all the time.  So I'm curious whether others have regular instability issues?  Do you regularly have cracking sessions just freeze up?
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Bare Metal stability vs PCIe passthrough - by nsweaney - 12-14-2020, 08:40 PM