So I am planning on a Cascade Lake-X 10920X system with TSX instructions off, and I’ve got a few concerns regarding upgrading Fedora to use as my daily VFIO distro.
First: Fedora is the latest and greatest, but not a good LTS distro. You can’t really stick to a singular driver on Nvidia as it’s constantly rolling release.
Second: virt-manager is dead. It’s been shelved in favor of Cockpit, which is a more enterprise level Webapp for managing VMs. Totally overkill for a Single GPU Passthrough VM. And there’s no guarantee virt-manager will stay in the repos.
Third: Drama surrounding rootless Xorg has many Nvidia OC utility people pissed.
Fourth: AVX2 was hinted at for a mandatory requirement.
The question is: Which is more of an issue? Upgrading Fedora fresh to a new one where the rulesets have somewhat changed? or use Manjaro and AUR so you don’t have to depend on Fedora EOL on some release repositories?
The other thing is systemd boot. I’m familiar with grub, but not systemd boot. How does that factor in?
On a side note, My concern with upgrading to Pop!_OS 20.04 is being locked to GNOME and having KDE broken if I change over to it, and the whole 32bit “selective support” thing that came up when 19.10 dared to take away all 32bit support.
I just have a LOT of uncertainty. Transitioning to a new platform in X299, I want a smooth transition and not a rocky one.
Thats not a knock on manjaro, its just manjaro is more a 3900X sorta OS where fedora is a threadripper sorta OS. They focus a lot on than hardware right now and are adding all sorts of cool features that I WISH I could play with…
I switched from RHEL to Fedora, because one of them behaves now more like a rolling release and the other one behaves more like an app with release versions. Removing HW support from a release of RHEL 8 made me sour to the entire platform. And they kept the same HW supported in Fedora.
Upgrading Fedora these days is as easy as pie and you are not pushed too hard into rolling over. There is almost always time.
Virt-manager is not going anywhere, still using it and will be using it. Removing it is shooting yourself in the foot.
Um, no its not. There have been commits in the last month, so maybe Redhat staff are no longer going to develop it, but that does not mean that the community cannot keep it working.
It mean, libvirt is pretty much stable, and I expect any changes to be minor, so it should not be hard for people to keep virt-manager working with libvirt. Virt-manager is also python3, so no problems with the removal of python2 from repos.
The latest commits specificly referenced fedora, so I think it will stay in fedora at least for a while.
If it does get removed from the repos at some point, why not maintain the fedora packaging yourself if it is that important to you?
The AVX problem is more if my plans don’t work out and I have to update my Fedora 28 to something newer on my 4960X. I’m making plan Bs in case I fail to get X299.
Why not manage packages yourself… is kinda the wrong thing to say to someone that’s more of an obedient end user rather than an code patcher. I know what needs to be done, but I’m still not formally educated in coding.
I still wish Fedora had a kernel selector like Manjaro, because my Blackmagic card also breaks with new kernels.
You shouldn’t need too much knowledge of actual coding to start with, more knowledge of how the packaging works then of how the program works. Then later if you need to patch something, python is pretty easy to pick up. There are boatloads of tutorials available for it.
Dependency hell is a place where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance you don’t want to be. I screwed up a Ubuntu 16.04 install trying to get a newer Mesa and pledged to myself “NEVER AGAIN.”
I get frustrated easily at the moment so maybe now is not the right time.
On Fedora/RHEL managing packages is not tha big of a deal - especially in the modern day of VMs.
As long as you trust the maintainer of the project you can create your own RPMs and install them using dnf/yum.
This is especially true for compiling from Source RPMs, which seems to be the thing you care about. That said - more kernels or modules is not really a problem on either. Dracut makes it easy to maintain long term.
The thing about Red Hat and kernel is that custom kernel builds are not supported in contracts. That is why the culture revolves around modules instead.
But what I don’t like is their kernel approval revolves around AMD and Intel Mesa graphics, not Nvidia at all. Almost all (and I’m very tempted to say all) the regression testers use AMD or Intel Graphics.
I use NV drivers prepackaged by a repo that does this for years and works better than the open source driver Even supports super old cards you wont be using today. Fedora was always pushing hard for collaboration and long term sustainability, Back in the days I had to hide Linux knowledge on my CV.
I dont know what to say - I like stability and I was even using CentOS for desktop/workstation
I’m a Vulkan driver tester and I stick to stable Vulkan betas for DXVK and such. I know the repo you’re talking about and that’s a rolling repo so you can’t really stay on a specific driver, just like you can’t stay on a specific kernel.
Then again, AUR will be a learning curve for me on Manjaro, but at least that has a kernel selector.
You can freeze packages and it is true that at some point the maintainers will outpace you if you are pushing hard enough.
Honestly I do not know how long it would take you to set up a clean VM to build your own drivers for the current version. What I do expect is that once you do it becomes a easy job to maintain them. Otherwise they would already drop support for GPUs that are really not part of circulation.
That said I knew people who were 3-5 releases behind on Fedora and had no problems. It is not good for everybody, because unlike RHEL you will not get backports for security.
Yeah, I’m still on 28 because I heard bad things about changes to rootless Xorg in the more current releases, but GWE is now on the official Fedora repos so something must have changed regarding that.
If you were using AMD I would recommend going ARCH using reborn installer. These guys also have lots of extra packages on their own extra repo these days.
I don’t forsee having to worry about arch dropping virt-manager for a while.
Even supports super old cards you wont be using today. Fedora was always pushing hard for collaboration and long term sustainability, Back in the days I had to hide Linux knowledge on my CV.