I am giving up on VM Gaming | Hacker News Reader

I am giving up on VM Gaming

deployonfri.day

46 pointsBoKKeR1134 comments

Having gone this route in the past*, once I accepted that I needed a second GPU dedicated as owned by the VM, most issues went away. No SR-IOV battles, just the simplicity of "Linux owns GPU A, Windows VM owns GPU B".

If I am remembering my build from the time, I had an RX 580 for Linux, and a GTX 1070 as passthrough to the Windows VM. At first, it felt like I was "giving up" on solving some problem that felt like it should be solvable, but it worked so well that I couldn't argue with the results.

It also assumes you have a motherboard with the right slots and enough PCIe lanes to get the performance out of two GPUs, and assumes you have a PSU with the power budget to support both GPUs. It definitely was a compromise, not perfection.

*Approx 2017 to 2020, before Proton or when it was was still new/immature. I now no longer care enough about games to play one when it doesn't just work on Linux. I assume the author does not feel this way.

Wouldn't it make more sense to use igpu for host than two discrete ones?

Yes, that would work the same way! However, I was on an HEDT system, with no iGPU and many PCIe lanes to spare.

I had a stint with VM gaming over Christmas but gave up after wasting too much time trying to bypass anti-cheat detection. My desire came from security concerns; games have a massive attack surface and running them on bare metal makes me uncomfortable. I've always wanted an ephemeral Windows environment for gaming, but it's too much effort to make it work.

I run CachyOS on my gaming PC now and I'm pretty happy with it.

> GPU sharing with docker and VMs

This should work without needing a reboot. You do have to bind the vfio driver at boot, but the archwiki gives a script to unbind vfio and load the Nvidia driver: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Bi...

Which anecdotally worked fine on my RTX3050.

I did give up as well though, all of this is just too much of a faff. Hopefully Intel continues to make strides with their discrete graphics. They are the only manufacturer without DRM blocking this feature which the hardware can obviously do.

Yeah, my proxmox game vm start/stop script does the unload unbind, works most of the time, the reset and start nvidia-persistenced.

Setup isn't perfect, but I rarely game and it has very little overhead.

audio does glitch from time to time though, probably scheduler delays or whatever.

> UNSOLVED: GPU sharing with docker and VMs

Giving up because you can't solve 'cold fusion' is a common mistake, when we so focused on the problem and forget the goals

At some point is just cheaper to get a second cheaper GPU. Or use a CPU with integrated GPU

> GPU has to be bound to VFIO at boot

You can bind and unbind them at any time. There are several guides for people doing it with only 1 GPU

Just keep it simple

With an amd gpu, using virt-manager I can GPU/USB passthrough with just a few clicks and no command line needed

I also like gentoo QEMU guides https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GPU_passthrough_with_virt-manag...

The other day upgrading VM Win 10 nvidia drivers got a black screen, and was able to copy it as many times to install again other versions

Yes, I have gotten blinded with all the possibilities a server with a gpu should be able to do, on top of VM gaming. Binding and unbinding requires reboot on unraid, its great to know that its doable without it.

I use libvirt, vfio pci passthrough, evdev and some other stuff and have been smoothly VM gaming for a few years. Mostly just followed the arch wiki when I set it up back then.

I get throwing in the towel with all these issues but I personally didn't encounter half of them.

I have a windows 11 VM under proxmox for gaming

- I bought windows 11 retail on a USB stick. (before the AI nonsense, etc)

- I run windows in a VM without a network interface. This eliminates SO MANY PROBLEMS. microsoft being problem #1

- I disabled all nonsense, windows defender was slightly harder

- I share a drive with linux (only one booted at once)

- linux runs lgogodownloader to load all my gog games onto the shared drive

- I install the games under windows from the shared drive

- someday I might change shared drive to virtiofs

- gpu passthrough

- I pass through an entire USB controller for audio, and plug in a USB schiit dac + headphones. passing the controller is key for glitchless audio

- some day maybe I'll figure out a steam VM. like maybe connect stuff once, download game for offline play, then take it off the network forever. Maybe have VMs for collections of games.

Do you only play singleplayer games?

In the windows vm yes.

have you tried using proton//steam on linux lately? I find almost every game I want to play actually works decently well now. The ones that don't are multiplayer/online ones that require some sort of anti-cheat.

There are a few games I've found that don't work under Proton. Rome 2 Total War crashes frequently, Battletech ( the tactics game from a decade or so ago) doesn't always launch and has sound issues, and MechWarrior 5 joystick support doesn't work (the game is fine if you do another input method, but I'm not gonna play a sim game and not use my nice joystick). The instances of games which don't work in Proton are thankfully few and far between, but unfortunately it isn't just games with anticheat rootkits.

> download game for offline play, then take it off the network forever.

From rough memory, even in offline mode Steam requires people to re-auth after... um... I think it's every 7 days?

Not sure about the timeframe, but it's one of those things where you can't be offline "forever".

Why?

I finally just set up sunshine + moonlight and moved my big machine to the basement. Works great for non twitch games, and there are clients available for pretty much every platform.

> GPU sharing with docker and VMs

Yeah, we really live in age of Internet Explorer 6 yet.

We already have cool features in browsers, like transparent backgrounds, rounded borders, and even HTML 5 video elements, but we still cannot use VM intensively for any purpose with no hassle.

Maybe 10-50 years later we finally can use Linux laptop with RTX 5060, and just run a Call Of Duty multiplayer while a local LLM will fix bugs in our code.

Apples aren't oranges. Making achievements in nuclear power will, 99% of the time, not apply to hydro. What are you trying to say?

I also went down this path but for a different reason. Game streaming to my steam deck from my ultrawide monitor wasn't practical. The games on whales project is really good, it's not VM but rather containerized game sessions. It has numerous issues with podman sadly which is why I now use edvi and various scripts to just generate a fake monitor to stream.

Interesting article.

So for someone who is constrained to one PC, is dual booting the better option, or is there something else?

The best option is to run a Windows host with WSL and an extra EXT4 volume mounted to both windows and linux (this is a non issue as long as it's not the boot drive for linux). User WSL for everything linux, optionally you can also just mount the EXT4 volume with all your stuff to a real VM if you need to (this lets you have windows GUI apps in windows, tho maybe WSL does this now too?). Everything works, you have the best of all worlds.

I did not understand the extra EXT4 volume. Do you mind explaining me the advantages of this workflow?

If you mount the Linux OS volume under windows while it's running it can get all fucked up because the two operating systems are not chill about who's really in control. You can avoid this by keeping the linux OS on it's own volume, but putting all the user data on a separate volume, you CAN mount this under both operating systems and get good speeds under both OSs, wheras using WSL native ability to access the host NTFS system is very very slow.

I would recommend dual booting over doing this. Microsoft is user hostile and the only thing they care about Windows users is how much ad revenue they can get from shoving AI down their users throats.

I recommend doing a dual boot. I personally do a multi drive dual boot, because again, Microsoft is user hostile and will sometimes randomly just blow away the Linux EFI partition if they're both on the same drive. . If you have them on seperate drives and boot to the Linux drive by default you can then select Windows from the GRUB OS chooser menu. This way when Windows updates and makes changes the EFI partition its only doing it to its own drive.

This will give you the best of both worlds, the privacy and user freedom of Linux, and the ability to game on the Microslop.

Dual booting is hell, it's never good, it's never been good. I don't use my computer in a modal way. Willing to accept booting over as a friction point is crazy. You can just disable windows update and all the nags and then it's just a good operating system, mine often runs for many months without reboot. I have never seen a single ad in my OS.

It's absolutely not the best of both worlds if I can't simultaneously game (or run CAD software in my case) while running torch w/ triton at the same time.

To each their own. I've been dual booting Linux for a decade, at first to learn Linux, and for the past half decade as the secondary OS for the 1/10 games that don't work under Linux. I'm a Linux engineer so all my workflows are Linux focused and I prefer the customizability, flexibility and hackability of Linux to Windows anyways.

I don't trust the Windows OS with any of my personal files. Even if you disable updates Windows is continuously pinging Microsoft, Bing and adtech servers. It continuously prompts you to install OneDrive and upload your files to their cloud and adds TikTok/Facebook/to start menu on a fresh install and you have to use a hacky workaround to actually do an offline install without logging into a Microsoft account. I'm looking forward to the day that Steam Linux has full game compatability and I can finally purge Windows from my system.

Ahhh, I see the issue, you must be using a Windows other than Windows 10 LTSB and presumably you don't trust your router. I dual booted for a long time before VMs were good, but the user experience of booting over is just so awful.

Best/easiest is probably virt-manager, with 2 GPUs, a cheaper one for the host

And you can swap between linux and windows VMs, or copy them to test things, break/fix it

I have a light Devuan linux host. And several QEMU VMs on top, one Win10 for gaming, one linux PopOS as a "server" with docker and llms, and other VMs..

Honestly, the future is probably going to be something like Amazon Luna, where you don’t run the game locally. Cloud streaming is going to be the norm unless we start pushing back.

That would probably kill modding, and possibly kill future gaming innovation

but the major game studio don’t want you to mod, they want to sell you the same game over and over again.

Ok. This whole blog post is weird.

I am currently using unraid as my server and used it for gaming as well ( though deck mostly took over that particular distraction ). In a sense, playing in VM was the initial draw. I stayed for everything else.

But the points the author is making kinda contradict themselves. Before I go to the actual claims within the post, please be aware that gaming these days is not exactly cheap. Technically, neither is running decent NAS, or server or anything these days. Not really. However, if you are trying to trying to do VM gaming ( and gaming is generally resource intensive ) and run NAS and docker and whatever else tickles your fancy, you cannot reasonably complain, because, well, you set it all up..

Claims:

<< Today I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless you are severely constrained in your budget or space.

Again, this whole thing is backwards. Unraid is not about budget or space. If anything, doing it well may end up being more expensive especially if you want to do gaming, AND docker, AND mebbe CV and random testing VMs and backups and NAS.

<< I am currently running 60 docker containers and idle at 14GB/32GB free RAM with a cpu usage of 10% across all 6 cores, starting the VM reserves my RAM usage to near max,

Does it sound more like an actual user issue? I might not be a heavy user, but there are very few times, I run things at all times. I can't tell if the user is complaining that unraid does not do schedule resources for them ( turn off things as it sees fit ) or expects that docker magically requires less resources.

<< Multiplayer games and anti-cheat

About the only semi-valid complaint, but here it is not even an unraid issue. It is gaming ecosystem issue, but I am willing to accept it, because there is really no solving without gamers as a group actually agreeing on maximum level of bs they are willing to accept.

<< KVM XML tuning became a constant maintenance task to avoid regressions, lag and lockups. I experienced VM degradation, Windows VMs that used to work properly became unbearably slow for no apparent reason

I suspect that the author had some sufficiently custom setup, because while none of my stuff is edge tech, I never ran into a problem that did not, at the end of the day, result from somewhere between the user and keyboard. You do have to learn a lot ( if you did not know anything about virtualization beforehand ), but that is true of most linux distributions in general. By comparison to where it used to be, the ecosystem now is fairly user friendly.

<< Another interesting use case would have been running multiple VMs using a single GPU. You can attach the GPU to multiple VMs but by default only one VM can be running which utilises the GPU.

Semi-reasonable issue, but the appropriate approach here is multi-gpu rig, which, again, if you buy into unraid for VM gaming, is, maybe expected is too strong, but, but complaining about it is like pouring cheap leaded gasoline to a lambo.

<< I was hoping I could use the GPU if the VM was not used for docker containers. This is possible but not user friendly, the GPU has to be bound to VFIO at boot.

Here I am willing to agree despite not running into that issue sine I use dedicated box for more intensive gpu stuff that is not gaming.

I had a much better experience gaming on MacOS than I ever did using Linux + X (it was first dual boot with Windows, then double GPU + VM, then proton).

But it's mainly because I do not target anymore games with stringent anti-cheats or with high setup requirements (though the M5 is quite powerful right now), and a lot of games are ported natively to macOS but not Linux (most recent to date is Age of Empire 2 Definitive Edition 1 week ago).

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