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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

likewise, non-Linux gaming was always the problem for me, however now that VT-d works really very well, you can now virtualise games inside Windows at around 97% native speed.

it was initially a pain to get working, however over the past 12 months the tooling has improved a great deal, in virt-manager you can now assign your graphics cards/sound card/... with 1 or 2 clicks, and it simply works!

MS are free to spy on me playing Starcraft II in a VM, and I try to support Linux with my new purchases wherever possible.

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so you use Debian as well? are there already good blog posts or similar on how to get VT-d working? If not, I think you could get quite a few hits with this, at least I would be quite interested once I get to build my next gaming PC. Otherwise I'm a mac user and I just despise not having a POSIX as the host system.

yes, Debian testing, stock everything

I might very well write a blog post, as quite a few people have asked

please do, I am curious especially about the video card (I thought that assigning a card to a vm meant the host system wouldn't be able to use it anymore, so how does it work)?

Besides games I'd love to be able to have a daw working well with asio and so on, as in virtualbox this does not work very well unfortunately (I guess realtime audio is not an easy problem to solve when vms are involved)

I have two video cards (a slightly older one for Linux).

audio was the hardest thing to get working smoothly... I have two soundcards, pass one through to Linux, and have a 5cm cable from the output into the line-in of the second card, which has hardware mixing so comes straight out the speakers with no pulseaudio involvement. needed a few registry hacks too (which I can't recall)

quite a few people report success with HDMI audio output, but my monitors are too old for this, so I haven't tried it

interesting, hope you write this up sometimes and that it makes the front page so I see it :) I'd be most interested in getting this to work with audio so I could have my DAW in linux indirectly, unfortunately virtualbox is not happy with realtime audio (if I go via pulseaudio it's bad, and assigning the usb audio card to it makes it crash)

I'm guessing you're using Intel graphics for the host system? (please write that article). I can help test to some extent as I have two VT-d capable systems.

I've tried this a few times, it normally works but never found a good solution for sharing my keyboard and mouse, how have you made that work?

synergy works out of the box, just need to remember that most games require the "lock to screen" mode (which I have bound to F12)

Hm, I did try Synergy before but I found the latency was an issue, I didn't really change the config though, is there something to be done to improve it?

I have one of those small keyboards with a touchpad for killing the VM (I mostly launch in snapshot mode so I don't need to shut it down :)

Another popular option is Synergy (https://github.com/symless/synergy) but I never used it.

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