This is basically the inverse of WSL2, which I personally think makes it a much better proposition for the bulk of truly techie WSL users.
- I love Go but the Go runtime is a pretty big snowflake, its one of the few non-libc users of the Linux syscall interface . Also, I think they fixed it on the Go side as well, for good measure, though I could be wrong.
<ms-rant> Plus, Microsoft- who needs em? Not a pleasant daily driver. My entire family already accidentally "upgraded" to windows 11. Ever since, they've fallen into a perpetual zombie-like state of confusion with regard to their windows computers and what is happening on them. What is good, better, or worse? *shrug*
</ms-rant>
I'd much rather cast the MS bits off to a lowly second-class Hypervised Cassowary VM.
Long Live CASSOWARY!
That said, I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone to use Windows. By all means, run Linux as your desktop if you want to. I do.
If it doesn’t feel like I control my computer, it doesn’t matter how polished the UI looks or how fast the games run. It’s a non-starter.
I admit that if I saw web results instead of local apps I'd be mad. But I have gobbles of Windows installations at my house and none of those have this problem, starting from that tiny compute stick hooked up to a large TV that my grandson uses to watch Netflix.
Not sure if it's been fixed yet, this was about 8 months ago.
Not sure what's slow about it other than accessing windows drives from wsl2 and vice versa.
The best way to do it is to have a seperate GPU that you pass through fully to the Windows VM - a friend has that setup - which works perfectly but then you can't use that gpu in Linux and I don't particularly think it's worth it for me to have multiple GPUs when wsl gives me 99% of what I want with minimal setup.
Of course, YMMV, I recall seeing that linus derp tech guy YouTube make it work one time. Good luck keeping it working properly in the long haul.
I feel I've already learned this the hard way, have several spare Supermicro servers to show for the result of what I consider to be a failed project.
Instead, I maintain a separate windows-only machine for such occasions. Takes up very little extra space or time.
Would love to hear from other folks who use this on the daily.
You can use consumer cards for this. Both Nvidia and AMD consumer cards. Nvidia drivers work fine now, and don't require any workarounds (they previously "blocked" VM's with their driver, but was trivial to workaround). AMD have a few hardware quirks, but that can typically be worked around too. Though you're best going with Nvidia as it's more straightforward.
It also seems that a lot of virtualisation software supports it (libvirt/qemu, vmware esxi, proxmox, xen, probably a few others). It's typically also, set and forget. Once it's configured, you're good to go. There's not much of "keeping it working properly in the long haul". I've had my setup for about 4 years or so now. Even through software and hardware changes.
It sounds like you're a pro, maybe I'm just not that good at configuring teh vmwares / virsh / xen / qemus.
https://mathiashueber.com/windows-virtual-machine-gpu-passth... https://linustechtips.com/topic/978579-guide-linux-pci-gpu-v... https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
And you don't have to do it for the most of AMD cards and the newest NVIDIA cards.
Unfortunately that's not beginner-friendly, I know, but that's the problem of VFIO in general - you can't really do it without being comfortable with terminal, editing configuration files etc. It would be cool to make it automatic somehow, but that would require making some tool(s) for all the preparatiary work (assigning vfio-pci driver, building united) and adding features to virt-manager (to be able to all the stuff graphically, without modifying XML).
But anyway, in your original comment you said that passthrough is not possible with consumer GPUs, which is simply not true. It's possible with pretty much every consumer card.