Hacker News Reader

Comment by warcode | Hacker News Reader

Please write the tutorial to run all windows games (at the same performance level) on linux and we're talking.

No need, someone else has done so: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3lno0t/gpu_pa...

Furthermore, native Linux games are only becoming more popular, and one way to make them more popular is to use Linux.

He said at the same performance level, which will never be achieved in linux until the GPU drivers are not fucking awful.

This solution passes the GPU to the Windows OS, running inside the VM, so it will use the Windows GPU drivers.

~3% performance loss is barely anything.

I'd say that's plenty efficient enough.

But ~3% is also what that tutorial found, and IME, is not the norm. Most other video cards that I've tried get much less than that. I'd love some kind of stats that show what the average performance difference is.

Additionally, video-card drivers are still buggy and fragile. And it's not just video cards, but wifi and sound as well.

You need 2 GPUs and one of them isn't utilised at all in the guest, so I'd say that's more than a ~3% performance loss.

GPU passthrough.

Requires a recent or non-K intel CPU with IOMMU though and the chipset has to play nice.

I'm using it on my machine in conjunction with Synergy to passthrough keyboard and mouse between host and VM seamlessly.

Performance hit: somewhere between 5% and -2% (some games actually run faster in the VM than on baremetal, most notably KSP and CSGO)

Setup is not trivial, as it will probably require an ACS-patched kernel if your CPU is older and also needs VFIO kernel parameters to be maintained.

If you do this, I recommend Arch, as the performance on the newer kernels is sometimes better (due to KVM/Xen and QEMU improvements)

Also lots of RAM and Swap. You're gonna need lots of it.

Many newer Steam games work on Linux

Dual-boot ;)

That doesn't solve the privacy problem, then.

It helps a lot if you encrypt the other OS's drive and use Windows as little as possible. If you have a computer with an IOMMU and a virtualization-friendly graphics card you can do even better.

yes, it helps by sending a signal: it gives to microsoft the information that you are only using Win10 for playing. And 'something else' the rest of the time.

If all you're doing on the OS is playing games there's not much privacy to violate.

People suggesting dual-boot make me think they only switch on their PC for maximum of 1 hour a day and have no idea what it's like to have dozens of programs started (and you needing all of them) and what kind of inconvenience is to start them all manually or wait your OS 2-3 minutes to start most of them automatically.

You also probably don't realize that many of us stream video and music 24/7 and your main PC is de facto a programming + gaming + home entertainment server.

> have no idea what it's like to have dozens of programs started (and you needing all of them) and what kind of inconvenience is to start them all manually

You can hibernate one OS and still start the other one. This way all your apps will reopen the next time you boot the OS.

> You also probably don't realize that many of us stream video and music 24/7 and your main PC is de facto a programming + gaming + home entertainment server.

You're right, most people will have to use Windows at some point :(

You can start following here: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/ it is a subreddit dedicated to hardware passthrough.

They run Windows in a virtual machine, and pass a dedicated GPU into the VM, the results are very impressive, but the installation is very complicated, and you won't get rid of Windows.

As VFIO matures, and the API stabilizes a bit more, I think we will see distros offering an easy "install and play" experience.

There is a complete guide here: https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/ And as you can see, it involves all kinds of steps.

One day, hopefully Windows will be just a shell to play games on :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com