kernel vs. qemu - what recent versions to combine...

[Frantisek Rysanek]

Dear fellow QEMU users,

once again I'm getting ready to taste some new QEMU.
It's been a few months (or maybe years already) since my last try.

This time, my goal is to try PCI passthrough via VT-d from host to 
guest. 

I've made a modest collection of dumps of "iommu group listings" for 
several recent Intel platforms.
Right now, I'm looking at the kernel and QEMU versions available.

My general approch is to use stable versions. Not the bleeding edge - 
rather, something with a high patch level in the third place.

At the moment, I'm eyeing:
QEMU 8.1.4 or 7.2.8
Linux 6.1.74 (probably)
I'm Debian based, I'll probably stick with 11.8 (12.4 feels a little 
too fresh still)

I'd appreciate any hints if there are any known pitfalls or different 
recommendations.

I've found historical remarks that this had some problem to work with 
KVM acceleration... hence my approach: use recent but bugfixed 
versions, and try to find some that play well together.

I have freedom to choose the software versions.
I'm typically PXE-booting the Debian environments diskless, which 
feels a little like virtualisation, only this is on bare metal... :-)
I have enough hardware to play around with.
The point here is primarily self-education / getting experience.
A longer-term goal is to be able to provide QEMU-based setups to help 
keep old systems alive.

I typically don't use libvirt, I start qemu-system by hand.
Which probably shouldn't matter.

Thanks for your attention...

Frank