Linux distribution for workstation that includes qemu pci gpu passthourgh

As pointed by @oO.o my question would be best placed here so here it is :

Hi,

I’m rather new here…
To give some hints on which district I would be more comfortable with here it is:

I have already 2 xenserver, one ubuntu server 18.04 does Virt with qemu on amd cpu but didn’t yet try the gpu virt ( didn’t succeed it on 16.04 with intel i7, i think the qemu was too old or maybe I wasn’t good enough), and one proxmox server nearly finish.
I don’t mind digging my way into config files but without any hint or specific steps it is somewhat impossible for me to find my way from times to times like for my virt problem on i7 6700k.

I’m quite used to go with fedora too since I’m using qubes os on my laptops, I have only one archlinux box at the moment. All my boxes are in cli. Just qubes os and sometimes ubuntu or in graphic mode.

And so my new setup would be on a i7 7700k with nvidia 970. It’s a desktop that I will use partly for a hackingtosh project, partly on Linux(different nvme/ssd so no worries there). I need to do some development with JetBrains python c++ the usual, browsing, and also qemu gpu virt for gaming under windows.

I’m restricting my choice with ubuntu, archlinux, fedora. So which should I go with? I really need some explicit doc on the one I choose to not have to find by myself after 2 weeks or months of digging around…

And so maybe another thing to consider would be :

But will I have any problem to set up my qemu virt with pci pass through for guy with one of those?

I notice that many of the test of wendell is I think fedora… And qubes use fedora too. I don’t have any preference for arch Linux nor fedora, I use both on regular basis just not for that, that’s why I m asking? Maybe one is more complete of the other? Like arch Linux because of the AUR PACKAGE like the Spotify stuff for example things like that and fedora mora secure?

And to continue my reasoning, maybe fedora is preferable for a host and arch Linux in one of the qemu vm? Or the opposite? Because as I said, I’ve broken my teeth in ubuntu 16.04 and pci pass through for qemu so I would like something that one of you guys are 100% sure that it doesn’t cause any problem

if you have any advice please do share.

And sorry I’m posting from my phone so not the best page setup…

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archlinux has prepatched ACS kernels, so go with that if you’re comfortable with it.

otherwise, the only way you’re getting any appreciable convenience is to use a commercial product like unraid or xenserver

But xenserver and unpaid are more for a server like I have already. Not really for a workstation is it?
And what’s the status of fedora about acs patches?

same as any other distro other than arch, you have to do it manually.

Pffff that’s really not a good news :frowning:
I don’t see why it is not by default integrated.

And what about the security point of view of arch Vs fedora?

It’s not integrated because it has to severely compromise security to work around intel’s broken implementation.

ACS is the only way to get passthrough working on the zx70 chipsets if you want to pass through GPUs and other stuff, so security isn’t ideal on either.

Granted the person would need physical access to your machine in most cases to exploit the acs patch in any meaningful way.

Okey I’ve forgotten about what I read when I tried that on 16.04 ubuntu.
About security I was more talking about the repo security. Arch Linux seems to be more open to what can be put in the repo than fedora,no?

not really. Copr, Flatpak, and 3rd party serves very much the same function as the AUR. You can lock down either one as much or as little as you want to

Okey I was not sure at all about that so that’s good to know. Some other things I should consider before to choose?

apparmor causes other issues, so i’d avoid newer debian and ubuntu.

arch is probably most convenient.

other than that, it doesn’t really matter if you’re comfortable compiling your own kernels.

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I disagree.

My recommendation is fedora. There are acs patched kernels in a copr repo, all you need to do is enable it. Additionally, it is a more sound base than Arch, in my opinion.

Fedora also stays pretty much up to date on the latest kernel releases.

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@SgtAwesomesauce
What do you mean by sound base in this case ?

In the end I’m going to try fedora28. I did try artengos this morning but apparently my Network wasn’t really working great and I had some packet losses so that’s why I switched to fedora.

@SgtAwesomesauce gnome boxes are based on kvm qemu so i guess no compatibility problem for me to make a win10 vm with gpu passthrough right ?

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Arch is not as stable, in my opinion, as Fedora is. I never have errant package updates, I never need to manually intervene on package updates, and most packages work properly out of the box.

Gnome boxes passthrough? I don’t really know. I don’t use it, so I can’t say if it’s supported or not. You can try it, but I won’t really be able to help you. My recommendation is to use libvirt and virt-manager. I know the interface is a bit more “old fashioned” but it works extremely well and is quite robust.

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They’re pretty much interchangeable if you use the lts branch to be fair. Wasn’t aware there was a copr repo for acs patched kernels, though, that’s good to know.

Only thing that shifts me towards arch from the jump is that It doesn’t come with gnome by default.

My frustration is that I need to spend hours configuring every damn software change, rather than having sane defaults out of the box on Arch.

I mean, anarchy and Antergos exist.

That doesn’t solve the sane defaults problem.

Antergos is still broken out of the box, and I haven’t had experience with anarchy.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by fedora and solus.

broken how? I haven’t had problems with it since very early versions of cnchi

Solus IMO has the best OOTB UX of any distro right now, I agree on that

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I wanna say I tried it 6 months ago, and smb shares were still unbrowseable on both KDE and Gnome.

There were a myriad of other problems with it as well, such as automounting of removable drives were only writable by root and networking would completely fail on my laptop (xps 13 9343 with an Intel nic) randomly.

This is getting a bit into the weeds in regards to the original question though. My reason for not recommending arch to OP is because he’s a bit of a noob and while arch is a really good option for someone who wants to spend a lot of time making their system perfect, I don’t think I would have kept using Linux if arch was my first experience.

I’ve always said that you need a certain amount of masochism to enjoy using arch. Also, I spend all day fixing linux systems for work, I want my personal systems to be stable and just work so I can relax when I’m off the clock.