Hi Gavin,

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.  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.

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!

Thanks,
Ashley



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Today's Topics:

   1. Virtualisation for gaming/home workstation (Gavin Westwood)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2018 09:04:05 +0100
From: Gavin Westwood <bitfolk-lists-2015@gavinwestwood.uk>
To: users@lists.bitfolk.com
Subject: [bitfolk] Virtualisation for gaming/home workstation
Message-ID: <d703a91e-95d3-bdb8-10af-ce4eb29df438@gavinwestwood.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Apologies for the non-Bitfolk/server post, but I'm hoping that people
here have some useful experience to help me decide the best way to set
up virtualisation for home use (local as opposed to remote access).

I've just built myself a Ryzen PC and I understand that in the past few
years things have improved with virtualisation allowing GPU
pass-through.  Guidance I've found on the net uses either Xen
(https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_VGA_Passthrough) or Synergy
(http://synergy-project.org/synergy/), but I think you can now do it
with KVM too (not sure if you can with Hyper-V, but I probably wouldn't
want to use it anyway unless there is a noticeable advantage).

I'm planning to run Windows for gaming and a few other tools, and Linux
for day-to-day usage and compiling (probably compiling in a different VM
to the rest).  I plan to pass through one GPU for Windows and use a
second for the Linux VM(s).  I may have a couple of other VMs for
testing or running programs that have particular
requirements/dependencies, but I'd only start these as needed and stop
them when finished.

What are people's experiences with virtualisation (especially on
desktops), and has anyone done hardware pass-through, particularly with
graphics cards?

Thanks

Gavin




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