Re: [bitfolk] Virtualisation for gaming/home workstation

On 28/03/2018 07:27, Ashley Nicholls wrote:
> I used to game exclusively on a virtualised Win7 machine using Xen.
>
> I would _highly_ recommend that you use KVM for this as it (usually)
> just works out of the box.

Okay, I'll have a go with KVM.  I was thinking that I might be better
using Ubuntu rather than Debian to keep up-to-date with the latest
versions? (CentOS would probably be better since KVM is a RedHat
product, but I've been using Debian for so many years that RedHat-style
distros leave me scratching my head for how to what I know under Debian).

> I would also recommend using an NVIDIA card. My personal experience
> with AMD graphics was good until the RX4x0 series. I just couldn't get
> this working properly under virtualisation whereas my HD6700s and such
> were fine.

I've currently only got AMD GPUs (RX480, RX560), so I'll bear that in
mind if I have problems.

> Gaming performance was about right give or take a couple of FPS but
> high levels of interrupt activity in the dom0/base system caused weird
> issues. I found ZFS on dom0 to be espescially guilty of causing frame
> jitter when gaming.
>
> My original system was based off an i7-3770 with an Asrock
> motherboard. I went through several iterations of hardware and the
> biggest issue was always motherboard/BIOS support for VT-d
> passthrough. I ended up moving to an E5-2690 and supermicro
> motherboard as the hardware passthrough support was superior to the
> consumer gubbins I'd been using before.
>
> Hope my rambling has helped in some way!

Yes, thank you! :-)

On 28/03/2018 08:07, Ed wrote:
> Why not dual-boot? There would be less desire to break from compiling if
> you had to completely stop what you're doing to game.

I've dual-booted in the past, and in the end tended just to use Windows
and find a way round doing things that would have been easier under
Linux.  It's a pain to close everything down to switch and I run various
services that I want to keep running pretty much 24/7.  I currently have
a Windows laptop with some Linux and other OS virtual machines in
VirtualBox, but they are slow.

I'll not be compiling that frequently.  It's more the other part of
wanting to do my day-to-day stuff on Linux and have Windows 10 there for
gaming and a few other bits I find harder under Linux.

> Though, having said that, cryptoware would nuke the disk. The paranoid
> pull the power from their data disks when running windows - yes, I know
> people who do this! (To be fair, crypto authors would *LOVE* to break
> out of a VM...)

I've been pretty good at not installing/getting exploited by malware,
but I do worry about some of the current stuff, especially the
ransomware, so having the isolation would put my mind a bit more at rest
(but yes, I am conscious that breaking out of a VM is still a risk).

Thanks

Gavin