Intro

I recently rebuilt my PC into a Fractal Mood — a minimalist case that blends beautifully with my office setup. That’s not the story though. This was the moment I decided to finally switch from Windows 11 to Linux.

I already spend most of my time in MacOS and GCP Linux environments, and I’ve been itching to remove Windows from my life entirely. Except for one thing: gaming.

Proton is amazing (cheers, Gabe!), but there are still games that just run better — or only — on Windows. My solution? A Proxmox-based homelab with GPU passthrough. Windows for gaming, Linux for everything else.

I was already aware of Proxmox, having used it in the past so I decided I really like the idea of turning my PC into more of a homelab underpinned by Proxmox goodness. My plan was to have a Windows VM with my RX 7800 XT passed through into it when required but also wanted to be able to shut that down and switch it over to a Linux VM for some light inference tasks.

The Problem

I was able to relatively easily setup the Windows guest with GPU passthrough, managed to install the operating system and also managed to pass my GPU through no problem. The issues started when I created a second Linux VM that I planned to run Ollama on. When I tried to shutdown the Windows VM and then start the Linux, the entire host would just go nope and crash. I had to reboot it to get back to where I needed to be.

I attempted many, many, many things to try and get to the behaviour that I wanted. One observation I did make was that the Linux guest (Fedora to be precise) released the graphics card properly. So if I shutdown the Linux guest and than booted up the Windows one, it worked fine. Not a problem the GPU switching to Windows. If I then shutdown Windows and tried to boot the Linux guest, it crashed. So I came to the conclusion that the problem actually lay with Windows.

Another observation I made, if I “stopped” the VM, as opposed to “shutdown” the GPU would release ok, even from Windows. But I wanted ACPI shutdown to avoid any data issues. It turns out, it’s Windows that wasn’t releasing the card properly.

Some of the things I tried without success:

• Installed QEMU drivers on guest

• Installed QEMU agent

• Attempted to pass the VBIOS into the VM via a rom file

• Installed latest AMD drivers

None of these things worked

The Fix

There is a utility in Windows called pnputil which can be used to interact with hardware. It can also be used to disable hardware via a command line. Using this tool I was able to get the Windows VM to shut down gracefully and release the GPU. The steps I followed were

• in CMD (elevated) run

    pnputil /enum-devices /class Display
  

  • This will print out a load of information and your output may vary but look for the GPU you are interested in

  •     Instance ID:                PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_747E&SUBSYS_2427148C&REV_C8\4&23f93f77&0&00E0
        Device Description:         AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
        Class Name:                 Display
        Class GUID:                 {4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}
        Manufacturer Name:          Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
        Status:                     Started
        Driver Name:                oem4.inf
    

    You want to make note of the Instance ID

• type “pnputil /disable-device "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_747E&SUBSYS_2427148C&REV_C8\4&23f93f77&0&00E0" and you should get some positive response.

• Congratulations you can now shutdown the VM and release the GPU gracefully

Automate it

Doing the above manually all the time would have been a trouble, but luckily we can easily automate this via gpedit.msc.

go here:

create some scripts somewhere on your C: drive

C:\scripts\enable-gpu.bat

Create the below script, double click on Startup and browse to where you saved it

@echo off
pnputil /enable-device "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_747E&SUBSYS_2427148C&REV_C8\4&23f93f77&0&00E0"

C:\scripts\disable-gpu.bat

Same as above but for Shutdown

@echo off
pnputil /disable-device "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_747E&SUBSYS_2427148C&REV_C8\4&23f93f77&0&00E0"

Conclusion

With this workaround, I can switch between Windows and Linux VMs without rebooting or crashing my host. No kernel patches, no risky hacks — just one native Windows command. If you’re fighting AMD GPU reset issues on Proxmox, this might just be your silver bullet.