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Comment by bsilvereagle | Hacker News Reader

> especially for professional users and gamers. Those whose applications are only available for Windows.

I have gotten around this with a virtualized Windows installation for CAD applications. The Windows VM goes online for software activation only.

With VFIO, a dedicated graphics card, and an nVME SSD I don't feel any performance degradation. The graphics card and nVME drive are passed directly to the VM. Some simple benchmarks show there is ~3% performance decline in the VM vs booting it native, but I don't "feel" it.

Granted, picking VFIO compliant hardware and setting everything up is far outside the ability of the average Windows user.

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What card are you using, and what virtualization solution?

I'm running my Windows KVM on a GTX 1080, and it took months and months to work out all the little kinks causing system instability... now it runs quite smooth. I could never ever go back.

I've been slowly collecting blog posts and articles with the idea of writing an updated guide to making a completely stable and optimized VM with vfio, hugetables, reduced DPC latency, bridged networking, etc., written for audiences that aren't too familiar with Linux.

It would benefit adoption really well if someone unfamiliar with Linux could visit a single resource that explains everything they need to know.

I'm really surprised it works at all, great job man

VFIO is the real deal - if you can find the right hardware. Unfortunately, there isn't a master list of VFIO compatible hardware (that I know of). You have to scour reddit or the Red Hat VFIO mailing lists hoping someone has posted the motherboard/processor you're interested in.

Once you have hardware, there are lots of resources for pulling it off:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vfio.txt

https://www.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Lenovo, Dell or HP business (vPro) desktops will work. Dell T20/T30 is often on sale for under $500.

What hypervisor are you using to do this?

I do the same thing for a "virtual gaming pc" on proxmox with qemu/kvm. it was a pain to get working right with my specific hardware and with proxmox as a base, but is pretty nice now that it works. Many people use Arch linux or redhat distros to do this also, but pretty much any major distro should be capable. AFAIK it works on VMware ESXi too.

Wow, I just assumed virtualisation would kill performance - didn't realise it would even be an option

works out of the box on debian stable with KVM these days, assuming your hardware supports it

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