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Comment by MrPowerGamerBR | Hacker News Reader

Except that if you require anything that is GPU-related (like gaming, Adobe suite apps, etc) you'll need to have a secondary GPU to passthrough it to the VM, which is not something that everyone has.

So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that people want to use that does not run under WINE do require graphics acceleration.

I tried running Photoshop under a VM, but the performance of the QEMU QXL driver is bad, and VirGL does not support Windows guests yet.

VMWare and VirtualBox do have better graphics drivers that do support Windows. I tried using VMWare and the performance was "ok", but still not near the performance of Photoshop on "bare metal".

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People throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.

On linux it's quite trivial. KVM is part of the kernel. Installing libvirt and virt-manager makes it really easy to create vms.

I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.

“On Linux it’s quite trivial…” giving big

“ or a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”[1] vibes.

Convenience features in software are huge and even if a system is well designed a system that abstracts it all away and does it for you is easier, and most new users want that, so it often wins. Worse is better etc

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The comment you linked is one of the most misunderstood comments on this site, which makes sense because it's one of the most cited comments on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

This probably isn't even the best dang comment about the situation, it's just the one I could find quickly.

Perhaps I should have put a larger explanation around it but I am mocking neither sureglymop nor BrandonM but we can still learn lessons from hindsight.

Sure, it’s trivial to set the switch in BIOS for virtualisation, and download a couple of libraries but people like computers doing things for us, we like abstractions even if they sacrifice flexibility because they facilitate whatever the real world application we are attempting.

I think power users of any technology will generally overvalue things that 80% to 95% of the user base simply don’t care about.

I admit that having touched Windows twice in the last 5 years I wouldn’t know but I would be willing to wager that WSL has very few drawbacks or shortcomings in the minds of most of its users.

Also sometimes the harder approach is also not as capable as some people make it out to be, and there are some unsolved caveats.

I don't see what's misunderstood about it, but also it's not right to make fun of the user for it.

Because it's only silly sounding because of hindsight. With today's context of file sync applications being a huge industry, that comment seems silly. But that was the prevailing opinion at the time. Check out this blog post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...

>Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.

That's just what a lot of competent people thought back then. It seems hilariously out of touch now.

But it wasn't my opinion at the time, and I didn't hear from those people. I was in middle school, kids were commonly frustrated syncing their homework to/from a flash drive, family members wanted to sync photos, and everyone wanted something like this.

Before Dropbox, the closest thing we had was "the dropbox," a default network-shared write-only folder on Mac. Of course you could port-forward to a computer at home that never sleeps, but I knew that wasn't a common solution. I started using Dropbox the same month it came out.

I'm happy for you :)

The future is rarely made by people who are comfortable with the status quo. That’s the only thing we can get from this.

His comment appears to me to say "please don't bother my friend". Him saying that file sync "wasn't common knowledge at the time"...ok? It is much easier than the solution the commenter proposed. In this thread, it's the same, people are proposing a complex solution as if it's trivial just because it is trivial to them.

Even the described FTP-based Dropbox replacement is easier than getting a VM to work properly with DRM'd software and/or GPU acceleration.

Really? With GNOME Boxes it's pretty straightforward. I hear KDE is getting an equivalent soon, too.

You can do GPU passthrough in a Gnome box, as in, your VM can see the host's GPU (let's say Nvidia) and it works exactly the same as on the host? Or another metric is if you can run Photoshop in a VM with full hardware acceleration. I haven't tried Gnome box in particular, but this isn't what I'm seeing when I search.

Ah, yeah, seems like I was mistaken and maybe Red Hat's virt-manager was what I was thinking of.

virt-manager is a bit more involved than GNOME's Boxes, I'm not sure I could recommend it to someone that doesn't know what they're doing.

Yeah, reading your original comment I was about to go off until I saw GPU pass through with DRM software. Highly cursed.

Yep, regular VMs where you basically only care about the CPU and RAM are easy, provided nothing in the VM is trying to not run in a VM. USB and network emulation used to be jagged edges, but that was fixed. VirtualBox was my go-to. It never had great GPU support, but the rest was easy.

I'm pretty sure there are solutions to assign an entire GPU to a VM, which ofc is only useful if you have multiple. But those are specialized.

Yeah! Even as a dev who can navigate vim, I absolutely don't want to do that on a daily basis. Give me pretty GUIs and some automation!

Not even close. I mentioned a software package that literally offers a full gui for all your virtualization needs.. how is that comparable to the things mentioned in that comment?

That really depends on what you want to run. Dipping into a Linux laptop lately (Mint) there are things, old things (think 1996-1999) that somehow "just work" out of box on Windows 10, but configuring them to work under WINE is a huge PITA coming with loads of caveats, workarounds and silent crashes.

The silent crashes get me. Also running one exe spawns a lot of wine/wineserver/wine-preloaded processes.

Tried doing 3d modeling in a Windows VM - couldn't get acceleration to pass through.

What 3D modelling were you doing that couldn't be done on linux?

Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux. Or at least I tried multiple times and couldn't get it to work

Really? I recall installing it 3 years ago, and aside from some oddities with popups, it worked just fine. I think it was this script [0]. I don't know if they broke it, I switched to OpenSCAD, which meets my needs.

[0] https://github.com/cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux

Mostly having software better than FreeCAD, AKA everything that exists on Windows and macOS.

I needed to use Rhino 3D specifically because it had an environmental simulation plugin.

None of your business.

I'm hoping that IOMMU capability will be included in consumer graphics cards soon, which would help with this iirc there are rumors of upcoming Intel and AMD cards including it

Quite a lot of people have both integrated Intel graphics and a discrete AMD/NVidia card.

Sadly I'm not one of those people because I have a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which does not have an integrated graphics card.

However now that AMD is including integrated GPUs on every AM5 consumer CPU (if I'm not mistaken?), maybe VMs with passthrough will be more common, without requiring people to spend a lot of money buying a secondary GPU.

Yes, my Ryzen 7600 has an integrated GPU enabled. AMD's iGPUs are really impressive and powerful, but I do not have any idea what to do with it and despite that I moved to an Nvidia GPU (after 20 years of fanboyism) specifically because I was tired of AMD drivers being terrible on Windows, I STILL have to deal with AMD drivers because of that damn iGPU.

I could disable it I guess. It could provide 0.05% faster rendering if I ever get back into blender.

AMD has SRIOV on the roadmap for consumer gpus which hopefully makes things easier in the future for gpu accelerated VMs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GIM-Open-Source

Windows can run GPU accelerated Windows VMs with paravirtualization. But I have no use case for two Windows machines sharing a GPU.

There is also native context for VirtIO, but for now Windows support is still not planned.

Also note some brave soul implemented 3D support on KVM for Windows. Still in the works and WinUI apps crash for some reason.

Anything GPU related isn't great in WSL either.

True, but I don't have the need to run applications that require GPU under WSL, while I do need to run applications that require the GPU under my current host OS. (and those applications do not run under Linux)

I don’t know why there aren’t full fledged computers in a GPU sized package. Just run windows on your GPU, Linux on your main cpu. There’s some challenges to overcome but I think it would be nice to be able to extend your arm PC with an x86 expansion, or extend your x86 PC with an ARM extension. Ditto for graphics, or other hardware accelerators

There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?

If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.

If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.

Yes, with pci-e fingers on the ‘motherboard’ of the daughter computer. Like a pci-e carrier for the RPI compute.

Good point about high speed networking. I guess that’s a lot more straightforward.

You may be interested in SmartNICs/DPUs. They're essentially NICs with an on-board full computer. NVIDIA makes an ARM DPU line, and you can pick up the older gen BlueField 2's on eBay for about $400.

> full fledged computers in a GPU sized package

.. isn't this just a laptop or a NUC? Isn't there a massive disadvantage in having to share a case or god forbid a PCIe bus with another computer?

There is ongoing work on supporting paravirtualized GPUs with Windows drivers. This is not hardware-based GPU virtualization, and it supports Vulkan in the host and guest not just OpenGL; the host-based side is already supported within QEMU.

I completely gave up on WINEing Adobe software but I didn't know about the second GPU thing, I thought it was totally impossible. Thank you!

I will do anything to avoid Windows but I miss Premiere.

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