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Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

Totally doable. Use KVM to virtualize Windows and (the important part) make sure your CPU and motherboard support VT-d. Then you can pass a graphics card (separate from the one you run Linux with, naturally) to the VM and get >95% of native performance. There's lots of videos of folks doing this.

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That's still "VM" not "Native".

You aren't running them "side by side"... you are running them "One inside the other".

Not exactly an apple-to-apple comparison.

The performance hit is so negligible on modern hardware that the distinction doesn't really matter.

And the performance hit is almost certainly less than the relative performance of a "native" reimplementation of a foreign OS's syscalls that doesn't benefit from the decades of engineering work that went into making that foreign OS perform well.

Except, it does matter.

Not having a unified filesystem, not having a unified window manager, etc are quite some issues.

Those are not meaningful issues for the stated use case of playing some handful of games.

They are when you want to use the game on multiscreen setups, or if you want to backup the game’s save files manually.

Source: I use my VM only for gaming, and it’s a horrible experience.

As another posted pointed out, if you just want to bring up a VM for gaming, who cares?

Also, you can share directories between the native filesystem and the VM quite easily. And if you're using something like VirtualBox or VMWare there are "unity" windowing modes available.

> Also, you can share directories between the native filesystem and the VM quite easily. And if you're using something like VirtualBox or VMWare there are "unity" windowing modes available.

I tried them – they don’t work at all in KDE.

Arch linux host, KDE as DE, Windows 10 Guest, just leads to a big black box in unified mode, and windows don’t properly occur in the KDE taskbar.

What I expect is integration equal to WINE – automatically putting stored data into the correct folders, easily accessible and mounted, integrating windows with the taskbar, etc.

And yes, this is "just for games" – but try gaming on a multiscreen setup when the game doesn’t show up in your taskbar and you can’t minimize it.

Maybe it's a KDE problem? Other people certainly have been successful. But I guess that's par for the course in Linux -- lots of incompatibilities depending on how your environment is set up. Something like WINE is never gonna get there for running games as well as a VM can. So the options realistically are using a VM or reboot. The VM option is really pretty good all things considered.

That issue was with the VM in unified mode.

With WINE, everything works fine – but not with UPlay.

So I can run the game, via UPlay in the VM (but not unified mode), or I can pirate it and run it in WINE.

But unified mode, or paid in WINE, doesn’t work.

As another posted pointed out, if you just want to bring up a VM for gaming, who cares?

Apple needs to do a utility that supports this as smoothly as Bootcamp supports multiple boot.

That's a distinction without a difference if you're using a modern processor with special virtualization silicon like Intel VT-i/x/d or AMD-V. With these features, IO and memory management is completely isolated between different virtual machines at the hardware level so there is almost zero overhead. With VT-d, which allows you to dedicate DMA channels to a guest VM, you can completely bypass the the host for all types of hardware including PCI/e, USB, etc.

The "Native" OS is also under the hypervisor. So effectively you have real CPU, real RAM, real GPU, and you can give it a real hard drive too. At that point does it really matter that the USB controller and network card are virtualized?

I've heard that this works wonderfully for graphics, but the sound emulation is pretty terrible. At least, I've heard about clicks and pops when the game puts much load on the system. This was on a friend's machine; maybe he had it configured badly.

Well if you're giving some hypervisor-managed sound interface to the VM then I wouldn't be surprised to hear that. The answer is to get a cheap dedicated soundcard and pass it through to the VM, just like you would with the graphics card.

First of all there is option to emulate different sound cards and I have no issues with Intel HDA other than microphone delay.

And you can also buy $5 USB sound card and have no issues at all. Or spend few bucks more and connect PCI sound card.

Hi. Do you mind linking one?

Thanks. :)

Sure. Here's a guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-hOr44oBAI

Here's the famous Linus Tech Tips 7-in-1 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXOaCkbt4lI

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