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I'm using ubuntu+kde plasma on a dual-Nvidia gaming laptop, and I'm running windows in vbox. Here's what I found:
Gaming on a vm is not possible, you'd be better off using wine. (I use it for older games)
Kde plasma handles the Nvidia cards fine with xorg driver, but VirtualBox 3d acceleration doesn't work this way.
VirtualBox has a lot of graphics problems on general with Nvidia cards. For example it can't see more than 512kb vram for me, but on other machines it regularly threw invalid instruction errors and crashed vms. -
have you tried qemu/kvm w/ your GPU dedicated to the Windows VM (device passthru)? It worked flawlessly for my autocad assignments. CPU graphics is more than enough for Linux, so giving your GPU away to Windows VM should not be a problem. Unless your setup does not allow that..
EDIT: Spice GTK now works decently too. Can't notice any mouse lags in latest versions. -
PCI pass through to my VM didn't work at all for me, yet. Officially it is only supported for the professional Quadro cards, but not the GeForce ones.
Anyway, with the closed source drivers NVIDIA cards work acceptable for Linux. With Steams inbuilt Proton layer, most games (from steam) can be played without manually setting up wine or playing in a VM. -
@netikras
Havent tried much of this yet, currently my os has a decent problem just to let me use HDMI port that's connected to the nvidia card and I often have to manually reset pci bus when plugging monitors, thats why I quess it's going to be pain to setup what you describe.
Will probably try it one weekend just to see what obtacles I might face. -
@sbiewald
Installing nvidias oficial driver was the fastest way to botch the whole Xorg and DM enviroment. At least on debian stretch. -
@GTom Depends. I also had trouble using my ATI card alown with CPU graphics on Linux. But giving the device away to a VM was not that troublesome. Linux reserved that particular PCI device for that particular VM and while Linux had no idea how to deal with it, Windows knew, ar they had proper drivers. It's like hooking up a physical GPU to your windows installation.
Of course that only works if your setup supports passthrough (Intel VT-d in Intel's terms) -
@GTom Official drivers from the apt repositories or directly downloaded from NVIDIA?
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@sbiewald apt serves both xorg and proprietary drivers.
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@sbiewald nah, it's probably not a good idea, apt tracks collisions, manages updates and any install that has a dependency on the driver will fail.
Another dev on my team just got a new machine. Before he came in today I made two separate USB installers and ...
Nix vs. Win
Dual boot vs. virtualization (VirtBox vs Xen)
(TLDR at the end)
- gaming laptop ("when you student but gamer")
- "Nix nono like gaming laptops"
- currently dual boot Win10/Debian
- Debian almost breaking apart
- only xfce because nVidia
- intel-virtual-output^2
- Atheros drivers sometimes freeze whole sys
- MiXeD SoUrCeS
- **Stretch Buster Kali enters the chat**
As you can see after 2 years I have come to the point of redoing everything, wanted to ask any tips on how to setup win and any nix enviroment, win just to play some games and sometimes to reverse win specific CTFs.
Main plan was to have my lovely debian as the only system and run win10 in virtualbox - problem: windows don't like virtuals(?) and it's probably going to be unusable for games.
Also running Kali as separate virtual (why the hell I didn't do that in first place ?)
Xen is the other interesting way but I am not experienced with hypervisors.
TLDR: Would running Win10 as virtual in or alongside(hypervisor) Debian be better/same as having them separated - dual booting?
question
linux
setup
xen
dualboot
virtualbox
windows