I want to run Win10 in a VM with PCIe passthrough. And a second VM with Xubuntu for serfing the interwebs.
I have a xeon and 32 GB of ECC DDR3
What Host OS should I use? What benefit would tumbleweed have over debian or xubuntu? Or should I run something like Manjaro/Antergos?
This system has to be stable, I need to do my PhD in the win10 guest
this is one of those things where we need a full breakdown of your hardware to give any useful advice at all, but your best bet would be asking on the level1techs forum
install windows10 entreprise and run the vm's in hyper-x or vmware workstation.
Are you shilling for microsoft or just completely retarded?
At this stage in development of all OS platforms, Windows is the best option for a host OS to use VMware Workstation which is arguably the best supported and most widely used virtualization platform there is and the only one that truly matters.
If you don't understand or grasp this then why even bother posting?
debian with qemu/kvm
Using Ubuntu (did it with Fedora as well, don't remember why I switched from that to begin with)
The hardest part is to unfuck the Nvidia (Nvidia on Host, AMD on guest) drivers as long as your hardware is compatible the rest of it is pretty easy (including shared sound) as long as you know exactly what you did to resolve it the first time
I am using X99, Xeon E5 ES, DDR4 ECC, GTX960 on the host and R9 390x on Win8.1 Guest
Other than that, it's pretty stable, I've passthrough'd a PCI-USB3-card and as such can use my HTC Vive in the VM as well no problem.
tl;dr OS makes little difference, but unless you know what you are doing I'd recommend one of the more popular ones as some of the steps are OS dependent and Fedora+Ubuntu has most guides/info
You're fucking kidding.
Not what he's chasing.
ESXi or Debian with KVM. I'd be swinging towards Debian.
I have a HP Z420 with an E5-1650
I want to buy a PCIe SSD for this system.
I would be using a GTX 950 for the host and a GTX 1060 for the win10 VM.
I have read that Ubuntu is not that good with PCIe passthrough, or is this old information?
Why Ubuntu? Why debian? Why fedora?
Why not tumbleweed it seems the most performent on Phoronix
Does esxi support pcie passthrough at all?
going with tumbleweed might be a decent idea since stable kvm version in debian is damn ancient.
you could just go with debian testing tho
No it does not.
I realised right after I wrote that that I'd done goofed. Hoped no-one would notice..
>What Host OS should I use?
Doesn't matter. Linux something. Ubuntu has AppArmor which might make it a little more complicated to set up. Personally I use Manjaro, works great, have had zero issues.
>What benefit would tumbleweed have over debian or xubuntu? Or should I run something like Manjaro/Antergos?
Pretty much nothing. Every single distro has support for this in the same way.
However Arch/Manjaro/Antergos has the ability to auto compile the VFIO "ACS patched" kernel for IOMMU compatibility from the AUR if that is needed. You need it if the two GPUs' IOMMU groups overlap. You probably won't need it if your motherboard and CPU support ACS (which it probably does since you have a Xeon).
Another issue you might find if you have two GPUs that are from the same vendor (two NVIDIA GPUs for example) it is really fucking tricky to get initramfs-tools (Debian/Ubuntu distros) to prioritize the VFIO-PCI driver over the NVIDIA driver. Thus the NVIDIA driver will grab both the GPUs before the VFIO driver. The VFIO-PCI driver needs to acquire the passthrough GPU before the NVIDIA driver does. On mkinitcpio (Arch/Manjaro/Antergos) you can prioritize that, Dracut based distros (Fedora for example) can also prioritize the VFIO driver over the NVIDIA driver. So Ubuntu/Debian is the only distros with issues in that department.
Since you are using a GTX 950 and GTX 1060, I'd recommend to stay away from initramfs-tools based distros solemnly because of the prioritization issues. You CAN get it to work obviously, however it's tricky. You can also exchange initramfs-tools with dracut, but that will cause aptitude to break when upgrading kernel modules.
So go for what you want. Good luck!
why not just use xubuntu as the host?
dracut has built in shit for easy blocking of drivers claiming particular PCI devices
>double Nvidia
Don't even think about Ubuntu (possibly also Debian), life will be hell
It seems Arch/Manjaro/Antergos is superior in this regard to tumbleweed.
Which one of those is the most stable? And needs little manual work?
So ACS patching is a way to patch the kernel if I have both GPUs in the some grouo, which will be the case with 950 and 1060? Does this also mean I have to patch the kernel every week because a new kernel gets released?
I have used Manjaro two years ago or so. It was pretty unstable and shit compared to Ubuntu based distros, has this changed?
What is with anteragos?
I think I will stay away from Arch I don't want to spend to much time googling everything, setting up PCIe passthrough will take long enough, and what I read on Sup Forums it seems Arch breaks very often
Not the same user.
Stick to Arch then. Use lspci to test if they fall in the same group. The ACS patched kernel is there in the Arch AUR so it can update through something like pacaur
Use Arch Anywhere to install Arch. Takes minimal user interaction to get it installed
Also I think iommu-groups command would work better than lspci
As I said, this system has to be stable.
And I thought Manjaro is a lot more stable because a new release is pushed every week and not every day
Use Debian and chroot xbuntu unless you need a newer kernel