So I’ve been dual booting Linux (specifically Ubuntu) for a bit now and I’m really enjoying it. Problem is I’m running out of space on my 120GB SSD and considering my Windows install is using more space right now I think it’s time I did something about it. I’m thinking about removing Windows 10 and just using only ubuntu but I also play games on my PC and in my time of using Linux I found stuff like Wine, lutris and play on linux to be unreliable at best not to mention most of the games I play aren’t natively available on Linux. I don’t know if it’s gonna be possible but I was thinking of looking into GPU passthrough for a Windows VM. i wanna use a Windows VM for gaming and pass my GTX 970 to it if I can that way I can run Windows games “natively” instead of via Linux as in my experience it’s dodgy at best. I have a 3570K and a ASUS P8Z77M-Pro motherboard. I’m on the latest UEFI BIOS and my hardware does support virtualization. I’m not 100% sure about GPU passthrough but from what I can tell my motherboards UEFI seems to be pretty up to date and feature packed for a Z77 board. I think I can probably get GPU passthrough to work but I’m not 100% sure or know how I would go about checking that.
So basically the plan is if I can get this all working is to use my onboard iGPU for Linux and pass my GTX 970 to a Windows VM that I can use when I wanna game. I don’t mind switching the inputs on my monitor to play games as it’s way more convenient than rebooting to Windows.
Anyone able to lend me some Linux wisdom here? Also I’m kinda noob at Linux.
You are not going to be able to do passthrough on your current setup.
Intel 2000 to 4000(pre-refresh) K series CPUs do not have IOMMU(Intel calls it VT-d) support. So, you have to buy a different CPU to be able to do PCI passthrough, and possibly another motherboard/ram kit/cpu cooler depending on if you want to move to a newer socket.
If you want to go full-time Linux, do consider if you really must have those specific games you are playing, or if you can do without / go for an alternative title that is native. Proton is an option, too.
For your use case I’d perhaps just spend $50 on a new 512 GB SSD harddrive, problem solved.
That said, your setup looks fine for passthrough, but do be advised the passthrough option is like RAID - sounds good in theory, but it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth. And it will not solve your storage issues. Good luck to you though!
My recommendation is to use Linux and Linux in VM in windows on your setup. Before GPU-Passthrough it was the way to do it. Linux suffers much less from limited performance of a VM.
In the meantime keep a lookout for Haswell refresh as they will start leaving companies for a kiss.
So you are running out of space when dual booting, so you want to uninstall windows to get the space back only to reinstall windows again anyway to do exactly what it did before just in a more roundabout fashion…
Excluding the above which makes this not possible, I have to ask why?
