Will do. Should have the parts and have it up and ready to start tomorrow
Maybe not the smartest Idea to buy brand new 10 days before a ZEN event.
I'm hoping for the best with AMD but they have just always created a lot of hype and it just seems to always fall short. Don't want to start an AMD/Intel war but just my opinion on what I have seen
Its half sticking with the brand i know and half wanting to give the Xeons a try. I will most likely get a Zen chip when they come out, if they live up to the Hype, and once i save again... which should be when they come out.
I mean don't get me wrong i have nothing whats so ever against AMD, and i like their CPU's, i have some AMD systems. but all my main systems have been Intel.
I'll give you a little insight into my purpose in building the rig I use, I didn't have gaming as my primary goal in fact it wasn't really on my to do list because I'm not a big gamer although I do play a lot of games....hope that makes a little sense, my primary goal was to be able to run Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Draw, and a couple color separation programs used in the printing/graphics industry that are also strictly Windows only programs.
My intent in doing this is that my wife owns a graphics business and neither of us wanted to move to Win X or really stay in that eco-system, we both knew and wanted to move to Linux but while it is easy for me it would be impossible for her unless she could run her Adobe products, yes she could switch to say Gimp and Inkscape and be proficient but that says nothing about the files already created that have to be used for clients, when you deal with graphic files that were created on one platform and imported into another you always have to adjust color, scale, etc and hope you get a printable image that matches the last printing...anyway.
So I started looking at KVMs as a way to run Linux and provide a Windows instance that she could work in as always but not be dependent to Windows as her sole operating system, I built my test machine, it worked after a lot of trial and error on my part as I learned what I was doing and what in the form of resources where enough to make it worth the effort in doing another PC for her.
I'm happy to say it worked way better than I ever thought it would...so I tried other programs and they worked in the Windows instance, so I tried games and hell yes they run too, gaming was a added benefit for me but one that I utilize several nights a week now.....
My point is that anyone can make a PC that will do this if you plan it all out and buy the appropriate hardware, I'm not knocking anyone who is giving you opinions or advice but I can tell you you have to think outside the normal PC building box, all the things you consider implementing in a PC that you will use for gaming or video production, or graphics are still the same considerations but you have to realize that those things will be provided both virtually and physically to your Windows environment, there are trade-offs that have to be made like clock speed (unless you are rich) that really have little to no effect to the KVM.
While clock speed is certainly a asset it isn't as important as threads/cores and since you are providing the CPU cores and threads virtually to the KVM you can lie to the KVM about what your giving it but the bottom line comes down to what you have physically hardware-wise to share virtually you can tell the KVM through QEMU/Vert-manager anything you like but if you don't have the physical hardware to back it up....well you'll just be fooling yourself in my opinion.
If Zen turns out to be what they say and at a decent price point I will build another pass through for my wife in 2017, if Zen is a flop or too costly then I'll build a Xeon rig for her, she's pushing me right now but I keep telling her she has to wait...lol Either way I'll be building another in 2017 and it may just be a dual Xeon.
Hope this helps.
1 Like
Thanks... Real food for thought.
1 Like
Just when i thought of it, and out of curiosity. Which distro did you go with in the end as your host?
1 Like
Originally I started testing on Ubuntu, basically trying to learn the ins and outs of virtualization with stuff like VirtualBox, it didn't take long to figure out that I was going to need hardware pass through for my needs, so I tried Fedora, then OpenSuse, then went back to Fedora and settled there. IMHO the best suited distros would be either OpenSuse or Fedora or Arch if you have the time to lean it.
The major reason you might want to steer clear of distros like Ubuntu is that it rarely has the latest kernel and normally has to be patched to get the needed support (or current support for QEMU), this isn't a real big deal except it has the potential to break unrelated things, not that it would just that it could.
In theory every Linux distro will support virtualization and KVMs it's just how up to date the kernel and support files are and what you have to do to get it where you want, it's why I chose Fedora it's modern, up to date, well maintained, progressive, pick a word....lol the DE matter little because you can create/install any DE you want and make it look however you want which is true for most all Linux distros regardless of flavor.
1 Like
Thanks allot. You have been an absolute help.
1 Like
No problem.....
I really should also tell you that this type of setup isn't without it's problems and faults, it's not a prefect solution but for a lot of us it's "good enough", if you think about how finicky the Windows OS is on bare metal you still have all those same issues to deal with, along with a few others, nothing deal breaking to me but quirks because it's a virtual environment or a container if you follow me, you can treat it just like Windows on bare metal if you wish by adding anti-virus, firewall, and malware protection, it really in most cases isn't needed because of the nature of it running in a container on top of a Linux host, but the option is always there, I run glasswire which is a really light weight firewall but I only use it to tell me what is accessing the network so I can keep tabs on MS since they tend to be kinda' sneaky.
There are issues with of course sound in the guest, i/o devices for the guest, lan connection for the guest and of course the need for the guest having it's own monitor 100% of the time...(my opinion), all are overcome-able, most are not big issues, there is also issues with rebooting the guest causing instability in the host on some systems with some hardware, but all in all it does work well but not without a few quirks. lol
If you like to tinker you'll love it, if you just want to use your software you'll still love it but will be forced to do a little tinkering to get it how you want first, Windows creates it's own set of problems that do not disappear but they are the same problems everyone else has to deal with so no big deal, and if you chose to run Windows without the overhead that is caused by anti-virus and firewall software running in the background then it really is a better way to use Windows in my opinion but it is just my opinion...lol
All I'm trying to say is don't expect it to be trouble free, don't expect it to be like Windows on bare metal from the get-go, and don't get discouraged when you have problems, we all had a learning curve to accomplish a successful pass through it's easy for me to say it's no big deal now but a year and a half ago I would have said it was harder than I thought it was going to be...but that was because I had to figure it out and learn Linux at the same time.
Good luck and don't forget we are here to help if you run into problems.
1 Like
Well it took some humming and haaaing but i got it working after a good 6-7 hours
1 Like
Damn this dual 2670 this is sounding like exactly what I want.
I am due a CPU and Motherboard upgrade as I am on Bulldozer FX 6100, which is fine right now. I am planning to wait for Zen, I very much like a full AMD system, but I don't want to get revision 1. I would rather wait for better steppings and bug fixing which will take time.
So it is super tempting to go build one of these super cheap dual Xeons, I do t need ground breaking game performance, I am coming from original bulldozer with a 290. So even if the xeons are behind the newer iCore ones for games it will be a jump up, and I expect to be running higher resolution by then so the load will be off the CPU mostly and back on the GPU so that is furtherly not a problem.
Regardless of CPU/Mono choice the plan was to go Linux with either VM pass through, or dual boot. It would also server as a media storage home streamer so the threads will be nice for that as opposed to the gaming. No video editing or any of that stuff really.
So this is super tempting.
2 Likes
Congrats..... See it wasn't that hard.
1 Like
Ironically the hardest part for me was passing through dedicated mouse and keyboard, because they kept working for a bit then they would switch back to controlling both.. turns out i just had to restart the VM and/or the host machine, I did both, then it worked. gotta love "Turn it on and off again"
1 Like