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Comment by sampa | Hacker News Reader

I'll just remind everybody that on Linux we have VFIO, where you can passthrough your videocard to Windows virtual-machine, and have almost native gaming.

As a big plus, your Win VM's disk C:\ is stored in a file, which you can backup and restore any time you want and not care about viruses/trojans/malware.

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I may look into that, especially now that I've upgraded to a platform where I have both dedicated and integrated graphics. My current worries are:

- I have a VR headset, how much work and how functional is it to use under a VM? I heard you'd have to passthrough the entire USB controller which is.. not great

- Anticheat still isnt happy about VMs right? That would cut a couple games I'm currently into

- How annoying is it to share files? Affinity Photo/Designer not running well in Wine/Proton is one of my blockers to move to Linux, and even if I virtualized I fear it might be incredibly tedious to use because of them being in a VM (unless modern KVM/Vbox/VMWare has flawless copy/paste sync etc)

1) most motherboards have several USB controllers, so passing through one of them is a no-brainer. then you just plug a VR into on of those ports 2) mostly correct 3) I set up Samba, so /mnt/folder/ in Linux is mounted as a connected network drive F:\ in Win VM. Works for me.

I've tried passing through VR with VFIO, but it did not work properly (Quest2). As soon as I've activated AirLink (with cable) I could only see my hands and a black screen. AirWith on WiFi straight up did not even find the desktop after the first connection attempt. I just reverted to dualboxing.

> As a big plus, your Win VM's disk C:\ is stored in a file, which you can backup and restore any time you want and not care about viruses/trojans/malware.

A little-known feature of the Windows bootloader is that it can actually load VMDK disk images from NTFS drives and boot them.

I still wouldn't use that for backups though, there are more practical incremental backup solutions for that.

Unfortunatelly VFIO is dependant upon your BIOS. Found that mine doesn't have the ability to do this which is frustrating.

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