Re: [bitfolk] Virtualisation for gaming/home workstation - BitFolk Users

28 Mar 2018

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 &lt;bitfolk-lists-2015(a)gavinwestwood.uk&gt;
 To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
 Subject: [bitfolk] Virtualisation for gaming/home workstation
 Message-ID: &lt;d703a91e-95d3-bdb8-10af-ce4eb29df438(a)gavinwestwood.uk&gt;
 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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