Okay so I plan to re-attempt to run a PCI passthrough for gaming, but I am unsure what would be better for an OS? I was stuck between OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or CentOS, I need a system with minimal resource usage and that is good with AMD drivers.
What distro would you suggest I should bare metal?
Thanks!
I'd probably go with something stable that wont break on you.
OpenSuSE is nice for virtualization. You would go with a standard install instead of Tumbleweed, and upgrade some pakages from Factory, starting with the kernel (stable branch is still by default at 3.11, which is basically obsolete).
CentOS is dead. If you want RedHat, go with Fedora, fc21 is coming out soon, that will probably be great.
Difference between OpenSuSE and Fedora is that Fedora is really optimised for kvm/qemu (in fact, it's by far the best performing distro with kvm/qemu), whereas OpenSuSE has to be updated from Factory to get the same kvm/qemu performance out of it as Fedora (but it is still easily achievable, they share the upstream), but therefore OpenSuSE is optimized for Xen, which is not the case for Fedora.
So depends on what hypervizor you want to use and what you've chosen as topology.
Fedora is minimal, OpenSuSE is anything but minimal in standard version.
I was thinking Debian, and at some point I wouldnt mind trying Red Hat on a personal PC, I have had issues with Fedora before, and the fact AMD is not really supported there anymore is a bit of an annoyance.
Is there any plans of Fedora and RH bringing back AMD support?
Also the reason why I thought CentOS or Debian is because they are stable, I would prefer a stable back end compared to a unstable one.
I have had good luck with CentOS. Both the virt-manager gui and the command line tools are great for virtualisation.
Keep us updated on your progress!
Debian is good bet from what I have read for since it is a lighter than Opensuse but if you are going to use the host OS as well the Opensuse may be better.
Will do and was thinking Debian because the base its self is lighter, so more power to throw at the guest
personally i use citrix xenserver.
Citrix is good for business Deployments but Xen is much more fun for Learning and general hackery
centos 7 kvm/virt is alive and well. i've not tried the specific hardware configuration you mention, but virt manager is a champion and i've had near metal performance of both windows and other linux.