Its no different to any visualization software (VMware, virtualbox etc) You create virtual filesystems (which are basically just simple files containing said filesystem) these are passed to the virtual machine as drives (windows will detect them as C:\, D:\ and so on) Its easy to move these virtual filesystems to other drives or locations (simply move the addfilenamehere.img (or more likely *.qcow2)) to a new location and update the paths in virt-manager (or however, virt-manager is just a front-end for various Hypervisors).
The linux rootfs is made up of various sub-directories with their own purpose and content. Most if not all Linux Distributions will default to installing all these sub-directories on a single drive/partition so all software you install will be located in that same drive/partition, but you can specify individually, where you would like these sub-directories to be mounted during install. You can get a description of what these sub-directories do here: http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/sect_03_01.html
Virtualbox uses its own Hypervisor which isnt a "Bare-metal" hypervisor such as KVM or Xen, therefore (at least afaik) you cant pass-through a GPU so the Virtual machine can access it directly.
Virt-manager, while having a similar interface to virtualbox is just a frontend for both KVM-Qemu and/ or Xen hypervisors, which its those hypervisors that do the "hardcore stuff" like GPU passthrough
I was chatting with a friend about this yesterday. He mentioned that his brother ran into issues trying to run games on the VM saying that there are some games that can detect when they are being run on a VM and will refuse to run. Presumably this is to prevent botting. Has anyone ran into issues with this?
i havent had those issues but i didnt try to really run any games when i got this working. i got the heaven benchmark running and called it good. i know the NVIDIA driver detects if its in a VM and disables if it does so successfully.
i would but i dont have that setup running anymore. i did it as an experiment to see if it would work. i got it working and then took it down. i am currently in middle of a college semester so a weekend project was all i could afford
Back when I was running Windows in a kvm container and played games on it with a GPU or PCI passthrough, the performance in games was variable, some games were noticeably faster, most games were about the same, and a few games were struggling.
As I posted before, I wouldn't spend too much time setting up this kind of solution any more, for several reasons. The main being that the Steam boxes are released in November 2015 by Valve, and that most games will be ported anyway.
Yes, I bet there are a bunch of us with Intel K CPUs (I have a 4770k too) that would like to try this out but can't. I will definitely look hard at AMD GPU's and CPUs for my next upgrade. The next generation of FX CPUs should be pretty powerful :)
I would like some help with USB passthrough, specifically my Cooler Master CMStorm keyboard. I expected the keyboard to work without needing passthrough, but every key press halts the video, for as long as a key is pressed. Obviously, unacceptable for gaming.
Mouse and VGA passthrough were easy to configure in virt-manager, but the keyboard doesn't show up, even after I assign it to pci-stub or vfio-pci in GRUB (I've tried both). Thanks in advance!
A samba server running on the Linux host works really well for accessing Linux files from Windows, and configuration is easy and well-documented. I never want to access the Windows files except when running the Windows VM, so I don't know about that.
I set up an openSUSE vm just for seeing how it works, and I noticed some minor mouse lag (the vm mouse moved a bit behind my actual mouse). Would this occur in a Windows vm with the PCI pass-through and what not?
Not at all. My mouse is also silky smooth. It's just the keyboard that's giving me trouble. When I find the solution for that I'll be sure to describe it here.
I'm new to this forum but joined after watching several episodes of The Tek on Youtube. I'm seriously considering making the switch to Linux and trying to run windows 8.1 in a vm for AAA game titles (also because I'm not sure about Linux support for my various controllers, game pads, joysticks, and whatnot). I'm having trouble deciding on what distro to pick though. I've narrowed it down to Fedora, Korora, or OpenSUSE. I've read that Fedora is for more experienced users, Korora is basically a more user friendly build based on Fedora with a lot of extra software packaged with it, and OpenSUSE just a good all round good and popular build. I'm running an i7-5930k and I've checked to make sure that it does support VT-d and I assume that my X-99 ASRock board will fully support direct I/O virtualization as well. I'm also running 3 AMD R9 290 cards in crossfire.
I've played around with ubuntu in vm on windows before but I never really did anything with it although I liked the look a feel of it. The os was very responsive. I've also been running my own FreeNAS box for about a year and a half now, which is, of course, based on FreeBSD. However, I have installed several programs that are not part of the the regular plugin library including murmur server, unbound DNS lookup service, and OpenVPN. So I'm not completely unfamiliar with doing things via command line.
I would appreciate any sound advice or suggestions. Thanks in advance.
Well, according to ΑRK, your CPU supports VT-d, which, if I understand correctly, enables the use of your machine's full potential. But you also need a motherboard that has a chipset which supports VT-d, as the Q85 or Q87. Even if your motherboard has such chipset, though, it isn't guaranteed that your motherboard will have it enabled on BIOS.
Thanks. Well VT-d doesnt appear to be on the feature list of my MB (Asus Z97-AR), how ever it is mentioned in the manual. Maybe they forgot to remove it when they copy/pasted it from a different model. Gonna check the UEFI tonight and see whether VT-d is an option or not. This solution is very appealing to me and i hope my hardware does support it.