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PCI Passthrough

Giving a virtual machine direct, exclusive access to a physical PCIe device such as a GPU or HBA.

With IOMMU enabled, hypervisors like Proxmox can pass a GPU to a VM for transcoding or gaming, or an HBA to a TrueNAS VM for direct disk control. The device is then unavailable to the host and other VMs.

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IOMMU(Input-Output Memory Management Unit)

A CPU feature that maps device memory safely, enabling PCI passthrough to virtual machines.

Hypervisor

Software that creates and manages virtual machines by allocating physical resources between them.

Virtual Machine(VM)

A software-based computer that runs its own operating system on top of physical hardware via a hypervisor.

HBA(Host Bus Adapter)

A card that adds many drive ports, commonly flashed to pass disks straight through to ZFS.