Hello im new to this forum, usually i’ve been on a Swedish OC forum but im not that into overclocking anymore(even if I still do it from time to time)
I thought, since watching Level1 channel for a while that this forum would be neat to get some answers which i didn’t get from the OC forum.
I’m pretty tired of Windows. Apparantly all the new creators uppdates and what not, screw with my DRM for my DAW. So i want a legacy OS that doesn’t do that(im thinking windows 7 since I have a genuine copy of it)
But I want to use linux full time, I have some experience with it and have run it full time before but now I want to go a step further with VM’s and IOMMU.
I want to be able to passtruch my Xonar soundcard and one of my GPU’s(the GTX980) for a windows VM while running Linux or ESXi(maybe somethign else which works better?)
I know there are several issues running GeForce drivers with code 43, but AMD cards a too expensive right now(a fury which is like my 980 is like 400 dollars here used)
But i’ve heard there is a workaround for that.
I’ve searched the net for a good guide how to set it up this way but when it come to software i’m a slow thinker. do you guys have any ideas?
I dont know if my specs are shown here somewhere but i have the SB-E platform, Asus Rampage IV Extreme, Xeon E5 4640, 24GBs of ram, a GTX 660 and a GTX980 etc
It’s pretty old and slow by todays standards but i cant really upgrade since it would be super expensive with Threadripper and the ram for it(maybe x299 but i dont know yet)
This is extremely easy to work around and the performance penalty is only about 1%, so not very noticeable.
That’s definitely doable depending on your systems IOMMU configuration. You can use either Linux or ESXi. If you want to use Linux as your main system, I recommend using Linux as a base.
Good system. You’ll be able to run your VM well on that hardware. I did notice that some people claimed that VT-d (which is required for passthrough) is not supported on the Rampage IV Extreme. You might want to confirm that with Asus. If so, the board should work well for your needs.
Don’t let system age fool you. There haven’t been huge improvements lately. I’m doing passthrough on a Ryzen 1700. The main requirement is number of cores, not speed of cores. Virtualization is very IO heavy, and that requires cores to process IO threads
I’m so fucking jealous that ain’t shit compared to the like 900 dollar prices in the US. Expensive my ass.
So what all are you going to be doing? Gaming? You can probably run most of what you want to play in wine just fine. Just search " wineHQ" in startpage or google or whatever and see what the rating is.
If you’re doing photo stuff theres Darktable and Therapee, if you’re doing code… its linux, if you’re doing art and design theres gimp krita and inkscape, if you’re just fucking around then it doesn’t matter that much what you have installed does it?
Right now with flatpak and snaps being out I would say go get Pop_OS or the newest ubuntu version and just open the “app stores” and look at what is in there. You’ll probably find everything you need to do whatever you want to do. I might be prejudiced being a 10 year user, but I’m confident in most new users.
Personally I don’t like passthrough for windows. BSD? Sure. Even OSX. But the point of owning a linux machine to only end up running windows anyways? The fuck is the point? Plus its a major security flaw. Trust me when I say that if you’re doing photo stuff you’ll be better off just running native.
I’m not doing any photo stuff, im prdoucing music, it’s kinda my job so it’s not for screwing around, i need my system to be able to record etc without problems.
guess ill just trash my thoughts on this then.
and yeah my rampage board has support for TV-d, it’s in the UEFI has menus for fiddleing around with IOMMU stuff(has the same stuff as my old Tyan S3992)
I would use Linux for the host and run Windows in a KVM VM if you need it. I do this and need Windows for work stuff. Once I’m finished work stuff I can kill the VM and carry on using the Linux host. Beats the shit out of dual booting or being stuck on Windows full time.
It’s much easier to manage Windows when it’s not running on the hardware. There is a lot of flexibility with how you set up the hard drive. It could be a LVM volume, partition, just a raw image file or even a whole drive. Very easy to backup running or not. Plus if you change your host hardware, Windows is none the wiser. Neither is any crappy DRM software that checks if the hardware has changed.