What if I want everything?

I would remove your hard drive while installing to a separate disk just to be safe. 

But yes, Ubuntu has had native NTFS read/write support for a while now. 

I'm quite interested in trying this out, but I have to ask.... Where does the extra performance come from? How does it run faster than native?

I've posted the reasons earlier in some thread on the forum.

It has been running quite a lot faster since 2011, but with the latest (especially AMD) improvements in the linux kernel, linux performance has gotten a big boost, and now the difference in performance is clearly visible, whereas it used to be just measurable.

Okay well I'm in the process of swapping out my motherboard to go smaller. ANyway since I'll have to do a fresh install and I saw this guide I figured I would give it a go. I Just got serious about doing this however I have a 3570k which I discovered doesn't have Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O. What do I do I was planning to virtualise windows mainly for gaming and a few other applications but the important part is games. So do I still virtualise windows or just use wine and such would love to hear your thoughts zoltan and anyone else who can help 

regards

The Intel k-series CPUs on 1155 socket don't have Intel VT-d because Intel has blocked it for no logical reason. That means that your CPU won't support IOMMU, or hardware virtualization, which means that you won't be able to use VGA-passthrough. That means that if you Virtualize Windows, which will still run pretty fast because your CPU does have VT-x, which means that the CPU will be accessed directly by the virtual machine, you won't however be able to use the Windows graphics drivers from within your Windows virtual machine, which limits the performance of the graphics card in Windows because you'll have extremely limited VRAM access (like only 128 MB or something like that), so a lot of games won't even run at all. A solution would be to flog the 3570k and get a 3570 non-k, which does not have the IOMMU lock, and you'll be able to enjoy the better gaming performance thanks to the virtualization, of course, if your mobo supports IOMMU, which depends on the chipset (Intel Z77 chipsets also often block IOMMU, most H77 or B75 chipset don't however), and on the PCIe controller (a lot of PLX-equipped mobos also make IOMMU impossible, you're better off with a mobo without PLX-chip). There isn't any real information available from Intel or mobo manufacturers (well, except AsRock) as to IOMMU compatibility of chipsets and mobos on the 1155/1150 socket platforms, so it's really not a comfortable situation at all. If that's not an option, I would recommend installing Windows 7 on bare metal and enjoying your games like that, and installing your preferred linux distro in dual boot next to it for safe websurfing, communications and productivity, so that you minimize the exposure to malware in your Windows install. It sounds strange that all the features that are marketed as performance features and that cost extra actually prevent you from having better performance, but that's just the way Intel and some mobo manufacturers have devised their marketing strategy, which is a cause of much frustration nowadays. Believe me, I feel your frustration, this whole thing with Intel and nVidia and Asus and others playing stupid has cost me a lot of worries too. I just don't understand their marketing strategy given that even the cheapest AMD APU or Athlon systems are fully IOMMU capable. What are we expected to do? Only develop next-gen solutions for AMD systems or socket 2011 systems with AMD graphics cards? Really? Less than one year after we recommended people to get Intel systems with nVidia cards?

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Is there a way to test for AMD-Vi support? I know my CPU should support it, but how could I tell if my motherboard is blocking it?

just boot into bios and look for virtualization under an advanced settings tap, or you could run 'kvm amd_ok'

Laptop BIOS -> no settings for anything.

It definitely does support AMD-V, but I've seen no mention of AMD-Vi from any command I've run. I'm just assuming the motherboard won't allow it.

Eye opening. This makes dual booting pointless and unnecessary if you can run everything .exe in linux and even better like you mentioned. I have procrastinated for too long and should be seriously learning linux. In the past I have taken leaps of faith and went all linux (ubuntu and fedora) but I ended up coming back to windows but not because I couldn't find the solution to something but after solving it I thought it wasn't worth it. But with the advent of new windows independent APIs, I don't really see the point of having windows anymore. 

Can you elaborate how windows running virtualized is faster than the normal way? Also, does having more cores or hyperthreading help? Having Vt-d or AMD-V, and supporting chipset is the most essential feature but let's consider that a given. 

So, doing this on a i5-2500k is pointless, and I'd see better game performance on regular windows?

Ok, before I do anything stupid I have a question. How much is the performance affected by this virtualisation? Like compared fresh windows BF4 install and the virtualised under let's say ubuntu. With Amd gpu and an i7. Some numbers would be great...

Really considering this but I'm afraid some shit may go down.

Depends on your setup, hardware and software, and on the games or applications you want to use.

Check Russian gamer forums if you want to see the benchmarks of evolution of performance gains. The big difference in added performance came with the latest kernels, so forget about Ubuntu. The performance gains are growing almost every day with new kernel features. Forget about direct comparisons with bare metal windows installs, people that use windows in a jail, wouldn't even consider installing windows on bare metal.

One thing though: this is advanced linux. If you don't have a lot of linux experience yet, wait a bit longer.

thanks zoltan... can't wait to do this. Eve on arch (or some distro)! yay :)

The thing is, I have some Ubuntu experience. I've been working on Ubuntu for the last 4 months at my work but at home I really only use Windows because of the already mentioned Adobe software and some oldschool games. But I'm keen to jump into other distros to see what's what. ;)

Can't wait to build my computer so I can use my laptop as a linux learning ground.  Then maybe eventually get this setup running on my pc

What would be the best Linux distro for this, I know you mentioned using Debian Sid, but what about using Linux mint and updating to the latest mainline kernel. Would that give the same effect essentially, but allow access to the more relaxed Ubuntu repos. Would you consider those relaxed Ubuntu repos to be a bad thing?

If you update the kernel in Mint, you'll have regular breakage like in Ubuntu, but it will solve a lot of the security issues with Mint. If you just want a nice distro that looks like Mint, install a nice distro that has a cinnamon community edition, Manjaro for instance, or Fedora, both of which have cinnamon in the repos. Manjaro is arch-based, which is a MUCH better choice than Ubuntu Core based distros, not only because of the higher quality and bleeding edge features and performance, but also because of the AUR, which has a lot of games and applications that just aren't available in any Ubuntu-based distro.

If you want a nice looking, full featured, GUI-centric distro with the highest level of 1-click comfort, just go for OpenSuSE 13.1. It's an intermediate distro, and it uses KDE, but it's damn' stable and has a lot more features, plus via the build service and the packmans repos, which are accessible from within Yast, you have a lot more software and games at your disposal than on Ubuntu or Debian based distros. And of course it's an RPM based distro, it's enterprise grade, it does make a difference. If you activate the Tumbleweed repo, it becomes a rolling release distro, and you get the latest btrfs-updates, which is a big thing for OpenSuSE. That is because OpenSuSE is the community upstream for SuSE, which is funded by Windows, and that influences the way in which SuSE, and OpenSuSE with it, is evolving in terms of "feel": Yast is a central settings manager, just like Windows, btrfs is a modern high performance linux filesystem, but has some features that used to be very loved in Windows but are not supported by Windows any longer, like full filesystem snapshotting (but in the form of overlay files, a lot more efficient and space-saving than Windows ever was). OpenSuSE is the free and open source variant of Microsoft's linux version, and a lot of things are kind of mimicked from Microsoft Windows Server Edition. Novell's SuSE (aka SLES) is to be avoided like a leper, but the community distro OpenSuSE offers a lot of comfort and stability, and of course is more leading edge than SLES, since it's SLES's upstream.

If you want the best features and performance, Fedora is the way to go. Especially in terms of pure open source based virtualization performance and pure open source linux filesystem performance, it's unbeatable. Fedora is the "engineer's distro", it's advanced distro, but the packaging quality is legendary, and it's the most modern and bleeding edge distro available bar none. Tools like fedora utils make Fedora a breeze to configure and very easy to use. Fedora is very underestimated in terms of games support, the official repos have a lot of games and emulators ready to go, whereas these normally are only available for arch users via the AUR, which are not official repos, so that's also a big advantage of Fedora. Fedora also has the FedUp tool, which makes it almost a rolling release distro, because upgrading the release is fast and painless, but it's also a good alternative for a real rolling release distro, because it allows for the continued use of some of the very powerful unique features of yum, fedora's package manager, like the history feature or the powerful reprise or cleanup features, and of course the presto feature, that typically saves about 80-90% of the bandwidth when updating.

It's up to you to try out different distros, don't think you'll stick with the same distro all the time, there is just to much choice and variety in open source to not try out a lot of different stuff.

There is just so much to discover, and so much variety in experiences and user preferences, you really can't expect an exact answer here, you'll have to try stuff out, but don't worry, it's a lot of fun!

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So basically if I want everything you have mentioned... I need the 4960x. Only chip Intel has with overclocking capability, VT-d and IPC for console emulation (required in a main system for me). Sounds expensive haha. Unless AMD has better IPC performance in linux (or less of a need for IPC compared to multi-threaded performance) that makes it a viable choice for emulation. 

Yes, ofcourse. You don't have everything, until you have everything.

Linux has QEMU and it works very well. E.g.: with QEMU, a standard ARM-Android version runs faster than an Android-x86 version, which is optimized for Intel by Intel, and it's much more flexible. Linux is also the king of emulators, emulators run much smoother and with better graphics in linux. Running an emulator in Windows is a laugh in comparison to running it in linux, the image in linux is much sharper and the fps is much more stable, and you can actually control the speed of the game that runs in the emulator.

IPC means very little in linux, linux is all about scaling and job distribution. From Fedora 21 on, which will be the first mainstream many-core-optimized general use operating system, CPU performance will start to mean ever less, and GP-GPU based acceleration technologies will become ever more important. Linux is all about scaling, you're better off with more cores than with higher IPC. Intel CPUs have a longer pipeline than AMD CPUs, that is all fine and dandy in single core optimized OS's like Windows, but in linux, it's counter-productive.

I agree that kvm/IOMMU (aka VT-d or AMD-Vi) is the technology to have. RedHat has developed a technology based on IOMMU to seriously speed up nVidia GPUs so that they might become more competitive again in linux, AMD uses IOMMU for it's acceleration and scaling technologies (they don't use crossfire bridges anymore and they have the "secret connector" on their cards, there are some guys that ran logical analysers on these, and if you search a bit on the internet, you will get some pretty interesting theories that explain a few things).