Does your graphics card have a UEFI BIOS?
I have managed to get the UEFI to work now. The UEFI version i had downloaded was missing the OVMF_VARS file. As soon as i downloaded the correct file, added it to the qemu.conf file and restarted the libvirtd service it worked fine. Thanks for the quick response and the suggestions. Also setting boot menu on or off didn't seem to change anything about the boot when the UEFI was enabled.
For anyone else having this issue this is the specific version that i managed to get to work.
https://www.kraxel.org/repos/jenkins/edk2/edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20150916.b1214.g2f667c5.noarch.rpm
Thanks again.
I've also got the same issues.. I even tried manually installing just the display driver and still get a SYSTEM_THREAD_NOT_HANDLED(atikmdag.sys) BSOD..
Swaying slightly away from the technical stuff...
I began to look for a distro to take up the lv400 challenge.
Took mainly Fedora, Manjaro and Arch into consideration.
I started searching for some know how and look what I stumbled upon.
Now, how cool is this.
Haven't seen a conclusive response to this:
If you want to start use Linux more and have the VM like in this case for only when you run into an applicationthat needs it and boot the Windows-VM for that specific task.
Hear something about that you can't "unlink" the PCI adress for the GPU in a case when you shutdown the Windows Virtual and just want to use the screen that is linked to that monitor for something else.
Anyone got any experience with this that is able to reply?
It's a possibility with Grub as far as I know, it should be rather easy to setup boot parameters that could be chosen at the Grub menu, but in reality your going into a dual boot situation where if you have to reboot back and forth to enable the VM or disable the VM you might as well just install Windows and do a real dual boot....but that's just my opinion.
if you have another machine, laptop or even a tablet, you could enable remote desktop on the linux os, pass through the gpu to the windows VM, and remote login to your linux os through there.. though you would have to have a linux account auto login, and auto launch the VM.. which i cant tell you how to do, just that its possible :D
or, if you have onboard graphics, just attach both to the same monitor, and change sources depending on what os your running :)
Well that wouldn't help if you want to use the added graphics card when you´r still in Linux.
I'm pondering on the idea to move over Linux full time and have a virtual Windows when i need it (for example: Arma 3, Sony Video Vegas or any other program that doesn't really work in Linux).
But on a basic level it would work for browsing the web and such, but in the end i would like to game in Linux as well.
@wendell What do you use to benchmark the SSDs in linux to make sure they perform as they should in your setup? I always use CrystalDiskMark on win7, but never really heard of a good option on linux.
Also, I want to dure the same thing on a 6700k system, but I'm looking at using two Samsung SM951's on a GA-Z170X-UD5, which has 2 M.2 slots.
Since only AHCI SM951's are available(if you can even find them) it is rumored that they would work with NVMe if you reflash them with the NVMe firmware. Do you think this would be possible or even benificial in any way? performace-wise they should outperform the intel 750 or even 2 of them.
I am considering to get a 2nd hand AMD FX9370 + ASUS Crosshair V formula Z for my main. The GPU pass through sparked me to finally do something about re-purposing my i7 2600k (Current main) as my home server.
Did anyone succeed getting the pass through to work nicely on just AMD hardware? The AMD-V, IOMMU and ACPI support is the main reason for me being interested in the FX9370 and Asus.
Yes...I have, AMD 8370. Asrock fatality 990FX MB, R9-270x on Fedora 22 works fantastic running Win7 in a KVM. The only issue you might have is using a Asus MB some of the FX boards have gimped IOMMU tables and even though it should work they don't.
Hmm. Is there any way I can test this before taking the board?
I have an i5 6600k with 2 cores / 2 threads assigned to my Windows 8.1 KVM and I run Witcher 3 on 1080p flawlessly with an R9 390. CPUs are still overly marketed to always move on to bigger and better. The only caveat to my set-up is that to maintain the flawless gameplay, I can only have one monitor that uses my on-board GPU or I get a noticeable performance hit. In other words, I liked to have two monitors for Linux and one of the monitors is used for Windows as well, (I just switched to DVI when the VM turned on) but can do that no longer. The pinning which @blanger mentions is the permanent solution, otherwise, just putting two cores and two threads in your VM settings will mean that the CPU won't be touched until the power is turned on.
There's a struggle I went through and I imagine others will as well, and that's being able to still run 2-3 monitors for your workstation. If you can get passed the bragging rights of having this cool tech and realize that you're at the forefront of the desktop PC while being on Linux, you will figure out a way of having Linux as your main OS. The other option is escaping integrated graphics and getting another GPU--which I imagine I will probably retain a bit more performance for when more heavy-duty games come out. Might I add, you can find another GPU for under $200 easily that can handle anything strictly desktop related.
Best bet is to search forums to see if the MB has been successfully used to pass through, normally the high end Asus boards like the ROG boards do work it's the mid-tier - low end boards that seemed to be effected, if your search doesn't turn up any results then all you can do is try, you'll find out rather early in setting it up if it will work or not, if your can't enable IOMMU and see the groups in Linux then your board's BIOS is gimped. I had this very thing happen and wound up switching to the Asrock board, in hind sight it was worth the expense and hassle to switch because the setup works so well that I'll never go back to running Windows on bare metal.
My only concern with games like Arma 3, which are heavy in the CPU area (I think--at least when referring to "simulators"), is that they're CPU intensive. A game like Witcher 3 relies more on the GPU, despite AI getting more intuitive, and so my performance is still phenomenal with 2 cores and 2 threads going to my VM. I will likely being trying Arma 3 with some actual FPS stats later this week as I'm contemplating on buying it while it's on sale. I'll report back when I get some numbers.
Yes, it's a very logical way of approaching this; however, if you you're running 2+ monitors on your onboard graphics, prepare to taka a huge hit on performance. I'm down to one monitor for onboard Intel and one monitor for my VM--only one monitor active until the VM is flipped-on. I'm not sure I'm quite comfortable with this set-up at the moment, so I may be grabbing my R9 280X and throwing it into this machine so I don't feel so confined :)
If you have a QEMU script, can you copy and paste it here? I went through all of this, myself. I have to use the following lines in their respective format--any other way of typing it out will not work:
UEFI
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/edk2.git/ovmf-x64/OVMF_CODE-pure-efi.fd \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=/usr/Windows_ovmf_vars_x64.bin \My image for Windows (I used this line when it was both imaged and not imaged)
-hda /usr/windows8.qcow2 \This is used to boot my installation media as a CD and is now commented-out in my script
-boot d \
-cdrom Windows.isoIf you want to passthrough hard-drives/SSDs
-drive file=/dev/sdb,media=disk \and most importantly, make sure you have no trailing spaces after
your "\" and that the last item in your script does not have a "\".
Let us know if you still run into any issues, and again, posting your QEMU script here can help us help you!
So a question.....do you now feel liberated, the reason I ask is that when I got my setup running and could play games on it it was like WOW this is really cool and worth the effort, I still have tweaks to do this fall when I have time and of course more testing with two GPUs in crossfire passed through but for me it was truly liberating to finally not have to have Windows as my primary OS.
A second question.....do you have any sound latency in your KVM? are you sharing your audio device?
I do feel liberated, in a way. It took some configuration to get it where it is now--I had to automate my bridge to receive WIFI to my VM, had to pass-through my original windows SSD so I could grab save files off of it, etc. I feel weird, but liberated, and out of my comfort zone--there's a lot of abstract thought that goes alongside something like this that requires you to suddenly change your way of using your PC; it's like comparing it to driving an automatic transmission vs. standard. Do you want to understand your PC and control it or do you want to just use it? There's almost this sensation that if you really love computers, you need to know Linux.
I'm the SYS Admin of a company of 150 people and I get to dabble in CentOS and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS at work, on occasion, but I mainly deal with Windows for our users and most servers all day long, so it's refreshing to have a project like this and feel out of the grips of Windows.
It's a fun project, now that I'm here, I sometimes question if it's worth it but I enjoy the new feeling of being warmly wrapped by the arms of the Linux kernel. I feel like I'm a new person while at my PC, leaving all of the Windows people behind in the dust--it's like leaving home for the first time. The only way to not feel like you've done something wrong is to come here and talk to people about their experience and know you're not alone :D (Okay...a little dramatic). I hope you get my drift...
There are things that need to be ironed-out and they will be, it's just a matter of me finding time--but there's nothing that's game-breaking to me using Windows in a VM and playing games the same way I did when on a Windows host. I still need to lock down my VM (right now it has all traffic flowing through, to it) so it's nothing special in the eyes of privacy.
For your second question: I do share my audio device--it's a USB O2 DAC/Amp (the same one that's being sold in the Tek store, except an earlier version) and I experience no audio issues other than popping when booting up my KVM. However, I can't seem to get my Focusrite 2i2 for my microphone passed-through, so I will need to entertain using a USB hub on my PCI-e USB card, to have my Focusrite dedicated to my Windows KVM--hopefully it works.
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