/tech/ - Technology

>>551218

Assuming you didn't get jewed out by Intel, make sure you have a monitor plugged in on the integrated graphics or an additional GPU.

>>551220

I don't have a vt-d capable PC yet, but im planning on building one (Haswell with Asrock motherboard).

Is it possible to have the iGPU dedicated to Linux, and a graphics card to Windows at the same time? I've heard that 1) On Haswell, it needs patches to work; 2) Works natively on Skylake; 3) A discrete GPU and a high-end GPU, preferably different models, by AMD with UEFI is guaranteed to work too.

Thanks for replying by the way, there's not much organized and updated info about this topic, but it seems to be getting progressively better with time.

>>551220

By the way, do USB and peripherals in general work without much fiddling?

>>551224

I'm currently using my iGPU for my Arch Linux machine, and an R9 290 for my Windows VM. It took a bit of tweaking but it works pretty well.

>>551238

You can passthrough peripherals that you want like keyboard and mouse, or headphones and microphones. However I use a program like Synergy to use a keyboard and mouse on both machines at the same time.

>>551244

That sounds pretty sweet. Is there a noticeable disadvantage in contrast to running native Windows? I've got a TV connected through HDMI in clone mode and my main monitor with DVI both handled by the graphics card, so i was wondering if 2 monitors plus the TV would cause some kind of conflict whenever i want to watch movies or something.

As far as I can tell, my hardware supports virtualization ( vmx (AMD-V) ) but my BIOS doesn't. Is there a way around this?

>>551256

Just update your BIOS. Hopefully you didn't get your support dropped early on.

>>551252

If it's passthrough then the performance should be identical to running native. And I'm sure it could work with your monitor setup.

I've heard that Vulkan will eliminate the need for a discrete graphics unit assigned to each VM for real passthrough.

Anyone else hear this?

Xenfag here, been running this setup for about 2 years now. Everything works, Windows is quite fast and can run almost any game at high/ultra. AMD, 8350, R9 380 + 6870 for loonix, SSDs for the OSes.

Is this normally a BIOS update, or did Linux and industry find a good standard in their updated distros?

I remember is being in early stages a year or so ago.

I am not a constant /tech/ie

>>551276

Industry standard, needs to be supported by CPU and Motherboard.

>>551218

Are there any special requirements or can I just place random low-end GPU into free slot and start passing my usual GPU to VMs?

is there any way i can automatically hibernate linux and reboot into windows? I have a pentium d which doesn't allow 64-bit vms and muh adobe after effects cc. Fucking 502

>>551218

Can somebody list some compatible parts?

>>551621

As long as your CPU and motherboard are compatible it should work.

>>551642

Why don't you just dual boot?

>>551275

Holy shit teach me your way senpai,

this is exactly what i want to do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>551218

I made some shitty guide a while ago on how to do that shit, now it may or may not be outdated. just go to http://daoloth.ml/ and save that page along with the pics/vid because imma host some other shit on it in a week or two. Also take that guide as some kind of guideline or info source because i think something is wrong with how i've done things back then, basically hdd read/write speeds are fuckslow.

>>551218

It's honestly the best setup if you don't want to abandon gaming. As for my experience with it, it was a very informative and hellish learning experience for a week since i've never touched linux before at the time but i loved every second of it going through success after sucess of fixing shit. Ultimately i went back to windows as my main OS for one reason, i couldn't fix the hdd speed problem on the VM, i have no idea what was causing it and anything i found online didn't fix it. it might be the install/start script i used from a youtube guide or not. In any case i didn't have the skills to fix it and it fucked with the performance.

Crunchwheels lemme post

>>551833

It's not too terribly difficult to setup, providing your hardware supports it.

I'll monitor this thread; ask anything you'd like.

I thought about running a setup like this one, but when I've switched to SSD I kinda stopped caring, it's easier to dualboot. Not to mention that now I have a multimonitor setup.

i'm not even sure how to install virtualbox

i did the "sudo dpkg -i packagename" but then i don't know how to run it, or where it is at all

>>551218

Thinking of getting a thinkpad T450 to run Xen and Fedora + whonix together then another space for gaming windows box (don't like Qubes and already have a computer for qubes and they don't support windows at all)

>>551265

lmao, dreamin, it will work sure but not without $$$ expensive support and other technical shit

>>551218

>Is it a good alternative if you want to play games or run applications exclusive or without Linux equivalent while not having to worry about privacy and security issues? Any limitations worth mentioning?

If you have NVIDIA you better learn to script qemu or fuck off because NVIDIA doesn't let you run their drivers in a VM.

Im running a xeon 1265l v3, amazing deal. I had a i5 2500k. the performance jump single threaded is about 25% (the same from sandy bridge to skylake) and I also netted 45w tdp instead of 95w and 8 threads instead of 4. The cheapest asrock mobo I could get that was itx and had integrated wifi, and my old gtx 760 though I want to upgrade to at least a r9 285 so I can passthrough. My mobo also has integrated graphics that supports 3 monitors at the same time so I can run all 3 screens windows or linux and have no limitations.

I had it working with QEMU/KVM in Gentoo with my older Radeon card. I couldn't get it working with my GTX760. Worse, I can't control the primary display adapter in the BIOS, so I'd need to put my good card in the bad PCIE slot if I wanted the VM to use it. Next graphics card I get will be an Radeon. I'll never get Intel or Nvidia again. I'll also make sure the mobo has a good BIOS menu.

>>552135

I have a gtx760 too. Did you manage to get yours working without soldering?

>>552182

No. I'm too lazy to learn to use qemu with scripts. I'd rather switch to AMD than waste time.

You can either use drivers before a specific version (didn't work for me), use commandline (too lazy) or like you said solder it to the quadro equivalent (don't want to solder my only gpu)

>>552185

I thought soldering was the only way. Do you still have links for the commands or scripting as you say? I'm pretty comfortable with it myself.

>>552186

no but I would start here.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_qemu

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_to_assign_devices_with_VT-d_in_KVM

http://www.firewing1.com/howtos/fedora-20/create-gaming-virtual-machine-using-vfio-pci-passthrough-kvm

http://vfio.blogspot.com/

I believe the specific flag is kvm=off

>>552182

Saved this from a previous thread. Never done this myself, so I don't know if it works. (I plan to get an AMD card anyway.)

Protip, you can softmod any NVIDIA card by patching QEMU. Apply the below patch then build QEMU. Then run QEMU with:
,x-vid=0x10DE,x-did=0x11BA,x-ss-vid=0x10DE,x-ss-did=0x0965,romfile=/path/to/BIOS.rom
appended to the arguments for the passed through gfx card device, replacing the IDs with the appropriate IDs for the card you want to mod to. The IDs in the example are for a Quadro K5000. You can find a BIOS and the IDs for some quadro cards at techpowerup.
Then just run the VM and the GEForce drivers should recognize your card as a quadro and work without having to disable anything.
The patch:

--- a/hw/vfio/pci.c     2015-04-27 07:08:25.000000000 -0700
+++ b/hw/vfio/pci.c     2015-08-01 21:08:41.158189382 -0700
@@ -160,6 +160,10 @@
 #define VFIO_FEATURE_ENABLE_REQ_BIT 1
 #define VFIO_FEATURE_ENABLE_REQ (1 << VFIO_FEATURE_ENABLE_REQ_BIT)
     int32_t bootindex;
+    uint16_t virtual_vendor_id;
+    uint16_t virtual_device_id;
+    uint16_t virtual_ss_vendor_id;
+    uint16_t virtual_ss_device_id;
     uint8_t pm_cap;
     bool has_vga;
     bool pci_aer;
@@ -3430,6 +3434,23 @@
     memset(&vdev->pdev.config[PCI_BASE_ADDRESS_0], 0, 24);
     memset(&vdev->pdev.config[PCI_ROM_ADDRESS], 0, 4);
 
+    if (vdev->virtual_vendor_id != 0xFFFF) {
+        vfio_add_emulated_word(vdev, PCI_VENDOR_ID,
+                               cpu_to_le16(vdev->virtual_vendor_id), 0xFFFF);
+    }
+    if (vdev->virtual_device_id != 0xFFFF) {
+        vfio_add_emulated_word(vdev, PCI_DEVICE_ID,
+                               cpu_to_le16(vdev->virtual_device_id), 0xFFFF);
+    }
+    if (vdev->virtual_ss_vendor_id != 0xFFFF) {
+        vfio_add_emulated_word(vdev, PCI_SUBSYSTEM_VENDOR_ID,
+                               cpu_to_le16(vdev->virtual_ss_vendor_id), 0xFFFF);
+    }
+    if (vdev->virtual_ss_device_id != 0xFFFF) {
+        vfio_add_emulated_word(vdev, PCI_SUBSYSTEM_ID,
+                               cpu_to_le16(vdev->virtual_ss_device_id), 0xFFFF);
+    }
+
     vfio_pci_size_rom(vdev);
 
     ret = vfio_early_setup_msix(vdev);
@@ -3553,6 +3574,10 @@
                        intx.mmap_timeout, 1100),
     DEFINE_PROP_BIT("x-vga", VFIOPCIDevice, features,
                     VFIO_FEATURE_ENABLE_VGA_BIT, false),
+    DEFINE_PROP_UINT16("x-vid", VFIOPCIDevice, virtual_vendor_id, 0xFFFF),
+    DEFINE_PROP_UINT16("x-did", VFIOPCIDevice, virtual_device_id, 0xFFFF),
+    DEFINE_PROP_UINT16("x-ss-vid", VFIOPCIDevice, virtual_ss_vendor_id, 0xFFFF),
+    DEFINE_PROP_UINT16("x-ss-did", VFIOPCIDevice, virtual_ss_device_id, 0xFFFF),
     DEFINE_PROP_BIT("x-req", VFIOPCIDevice, features,
                     VFIO_FEATURE_ENABLE_REQ_BIT, true),
     DEFINE_PROP_INT32("bootindex", VFIOPCIDevice, bootindex, -1),

>>552188

Thanks a lot.

>KVM=off

Unlikely. KVM is for OSes that aren't made to be guests. It's for full virtualization, I think, as apposed to something like Linux which can have a kernel made to be virtualized. That won't work for Windows.

Is there a point to doing a passthrough if you don't play vidya? I can't think of any reason. I don't need CAD or anything windows-specific, and I hate windows too much to warrant installing it just for sony vegas.

>>552218

PCI passthrough has very niche uses. If you can't think of why you would want or need it, you probably have no use for it.

>tfw processor doesn't support it

;_;

>>551218

I have AMD and it's just fookin works m8. I only needed to buy a kvm switch THAT'S IT. Can't wait till zen and polaris comes out end of this year.

I feel sad for those of you who fell for the 'le intel lga socket mustard race' meme.

Once summit ridge why would you even think about touching intel? Only thing Intel is good for is super power efficient i3 cpu's for laptops. Those broadwell and skylake i3's sip power at a measly 10-15w while preforming better then a i7-640lm which gulps 25-30w.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-640LM-vs-Intel-Core-i3-5010U

Point is buy AMD summit ridge for desktops and buy intel for low end laptops.

>>551224

NO. Just get summit ridge when it comes out. It will preform better then haswell, have ddr4, be on AM4 socket, die shrink down to 14nm, and support iommu and virtualization while being overclockable. Can't overclock and virtualize with intel. Amd support kvm much better then intel.

>>551275

Kvm+qemu > xen

>>552003

>>551275

>>551833

Its me senpai, the Thinkpad guy was my post,

Is the thinkpad good enough hardware-wise?

thinking Xen + fedora dom0, domU fedora + whonix then domU windows gayming

I am using qubes with a super-old laptop atm and it works fine without the gaming/windows... i imagine with the T450 Xen will be plenty when i Kill the other domu

I also want to make a .deb/source git from Xen/dependenices so I could set up offline if I ever need to where are the yum install download at when I CLI the whole xen setup/virt mang?

>>552230

I always just call M$ and tell the automated voice that sweet nothings until it gives me a new key. A real human never answers, and the robot always believes everything I say.

>>552382

Social engineering with robots.

I'll see if I can extract the keys somehow...

>>552419

This would propbably be easier.

http://kmspico10.com/

https://kat.cr/usearch/kmspico/?field=seeders&sorder=desc - from the wiki.

> How's your experience with a Linux distro as Host OS, and Windows as Guest OS?

Very good, got it going with an 860K, R9 290. Host GPU is a 9800 GT.

PSU got raped last week and I'm still waiting for the replacement. In the meantime, no way I can power that R9 so I'm stuck without winshit games for now.

>>552230

I wish you luck. Windows doesn't like it when your storage controller changes. Even Windows 10 is finicky with controller drivers.

>>552245

Not particularly. I've tested both extensively - performance wise, virtio and xenpv are nearly identical. For me, KVM used to not play well with my mobo's iommu and grsecurity *cough*, and Xen has a far superior interface for setup and management than running qemu instances. The choice was easy.

Side note, if you use libvirt, you should consider suicide.

>>552303

It can probably run it just fine, but there's the matter of graphics. You need another fully seperate card from the one driving dom0, not just extra outputs. If you can get a T430 with integrated + dedicated graphics, then you're golden.

I have heard rumors of people getting this working on laptops with nvidia optimus, etc. using the discrete card and framebuffer, but I've yet to see this. Fuck, that would be cool.

>>552831

I would assume so. Would be neat to try out.

>>552841

My condolences.

>>552861

Yeah I guess maybe I can look at the double GPU thinkpads as well

have dom0/U fedora config with intel card and nividia to domU windows

Got a Bash history of a short write up of how to do it from start?

I wanted to do this, but then Asus pulled their bullshit so my specific MB isn't capable of it.

Should I buy an FX-8350 or some Opteron(s) for a setup like this?

Used Opteron 6282s are pretty cheap to come by, but the only ATX-sized G34 board I can find only has 1 PCIe x16 slot, which means I'd have to get a new case to fit a dual/quad socket board into, which I don't need.

>>551830

I am dualbooting but a script could be helpful.

I've got mine running pretty well: two Windows seats running at once so two people can game on one PC. Helped my family save money by buying one PC instead of two. Only thing I can't figure out is how to get my X-Fi Titanium HD working. Something is wrong with the way VFIO handles PCI interrupts, so the sound just won't work when I install the official drivers. I've already tried with "nointxmask" turned on. No one seems to know what's going on, as I got no replies on the mailing list.

I need a cheap gpu literally just to support my monitors on the linux side, no integrated on my mobo unfortunately

any recommendations?

>>553015

I don't, sadly. It's really not hard setting up Xen, though. Just follow your distro's instructions.

>>553144

>1 PCIe x16

That could be a problem.

>>553495

VFIO is a broken mess that only works when you hit it. No surprise there.

What kinda hardware is in there?

>>553495

Whats your setup? Debian Kernel?

>>551218

my advice is that you grow up and get out of video games, use a real os

lads, if you are running newish intel graphics, you almost don't need pci passthrough.

kvmgt.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1601.3/02970.html

this is the new age with gpu virtualization.

>>553634

>>553815

>What kinda hardware is in there?

>Whats your setup? Debian Kernel?

I wasn't really expecting help from anyone, just sharing about potential issues, but I appreciate it.

Here's my hardware:

Kernel: Gentoo 4.1.6-ck x86_64
MoBo: Asus X99-PRO/USB 3.1
CPU: i7-5820K
GPU:
    1) GTX 970 - Passthrough #1
    2) GT 740 - Linux
    3) GTX 970 - Passthrough #2
Audio:
    1) Creative X-Fi Titanium HD (EMU20k2) - Passthrough #1 (DOESN'T WORK)
    2) Intel HD Audio - Passthrough #2

It's likely that none of this info is relevant to the issue, but maybe someone will spot something.

>>556453

Unfortunately proprietary video drivers don't allow dynamic binding of video cards. If you use the open source ones, I believe that it's possible, but I couldn't tell you how. You definitely can't use Linux and Windows at once; in the future maybe.

>>553821

-t. office drone

>>551218

https://archive.is/YDoXX

Someone could probably use this.

>>556453

You can make two boot entries in grub, one blacklisting the R9280X so it can be used by VM. Of course this way you still have to reboot when switching the graphics card to/from the VM.

Another option would be to create a GNU/Linux gaming VM with PCI passthrough, but I have no idea how the card reacts to driver change without shutting down.

I'm looking into trying this myself, but I'd rather have the GPU be used by Linux on boot for Linux/Wine software, then disable it when I need to start Windows so the VM can use the GPU. Then obviously re-enable it when the VM is closed so Linux can use it again. (I haven't bought a GPU yet, so I can't test anything. Waiting for my next paycheck. The R9 380 looks fine, but is there any reason to wait for new GPUs?)

https://superuser.com/questions/914810/how-to-disable-a-plugged-in-pci-e-graphic-card-on-os-level

If I understand the answer correctly, this just blacklists the module meaning it won't be used. Will this do what I want, or is there something else I should be looking at?

Also, I have a second monitor. Is it possible in Linux to have each screen use a different GPU but share the desktop space? (I thought Windows didn't work well with trying to use 2 GPUs at once, which is why I ask.)

Lastly, Xen or QEMU? I've seen guides usually recommend QEMU, but it seems some of you prefer Xen. What are the pros and cons of each? Any other VM software I should be looking at?

When will we be able to pass optimus enabled GPUs on laptops? Currently its not possible because optimus works by writing final image to the CPU's framebuffer rather than the GPUs, but apparently it would be simple enough with a kernel mode driver to hook the GPU such that a VM uses the GPU framebuffer before compositing with the real framebuffer.

>>551218

>How's your experience with a Linux distro as Host OS, and Windows as Guest OS?

I only do it for Internet Explorer because my job has webapps that don't work in any other browser. IE works perfectly if your hardware isn't shit. I haven't tried vidya or anything really resource-heavy since all I have is this old X200, but if you get a good GPU I don't see why it shouldn't work.

>>552382

I remember doing this back with XP when it was not a robot but some subhuman. But yeah, you can get away with calling them and asking for another activation so many times. I think my excuse was that "I test VMs for my job and blah blah"

>>551935

what OS are you using?

>>551935

>dpkg

If you use tab-completion it should show up. Alternatively it should show up in the GUI. If neither work trying using apt-get.

>>558953

I would assume they are using Debian or one of it's bastard children.

>>558773

there was something that allows you to use intel's iGPU in VMs while sharing it with the host, but I don't know how viable it actually is

also, it only works on intel, no AMD or nvidia yet

12 gb - host- SSD

12 gb - guest-1tb ssd+HDD

12 gb - guest-1tb ssd+HDD

16 gb - servers

08 gb - XBMC-HDD

+4gb of ram left over.

>>562940

So is this RAM allocated to your VMs?

>>558698

Multi-gpu screen extending is totally possible with randr.

YMMV, Xen is a more managed solution that (for me) has been stable. Qemu seems to have more bleeding edge features.

https://alternativeto.net/software/synergy/?license=free&platform=linux

http://fredrik.hubbe.net/x2vnc.html

So this came up as the only free alternative to Synergy for Linux on alternativeto.net (the license part is probably redundant as there are really no other alternatives)

Is it any good, or are there any alternatives not listed on the site that might work for sharing keyboard/mouse input? Anything built into Xen/QEMU that might work?

>>564497

I've heard that Xen doesn't work with some Nvidia cards, while QEMU should. (Not sure if the latter still requires some tweaking) Is that true?

Can I do this with a macbook

>>558698

>I'm looking into trying this myself, but I'd rather have the GPU be used by Linux on boot for Linux/Wine software, then disable it when I need to start Windows so the VM can use the GPU.

Only kinda works with open source drivers (meaning not great for gaming) right now. AMD's and nVidia's proprietary drivers aren't well-behaved when it comes to unbinding devices, so you have to reload the driver which itself causes other issues. Not to mention X doesn't really have support for GPU hotswapping, so you'd have to do some ghetto setup involving restarting X or using multiple X servers.

>>551224

I have no problems on a xeon 1265l v3 (haswell). My problem is the gtx 760 driver tosses error code 43

>>568580

sell your macbook and build a gaming pc and buy a mediocre laptop

No problem in Windows 2008 R2!

;^D~

>>568594

So looking into this, I found that wayland added gpu swap support back in 2010. For X, I found 1 person who showed adding a GPU using his own patch, but posted no progress since then or even the patch itself.

Why is X so widely used again?

>>558698

If you blacklist the driver then it won't load and you won't get host graphics. What you want is to just proceed as normal using the open source driver module (proprietary shit tends to not unbind well and you get fucked when you try to forward into the VM). Then, when you want to start the VM, you need to close the X server running on that card, unbind the card from your driver and bind it to vfio-pci. Basically this involves some low level fuckery where you write your device's location string (such as 0000:02:00.0) to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/<yourgfxdriver>/unbind and then echo it again to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/bind. Note you will need to manually load the vfio-pci module first since it won't be autodetected as a necessary driver. If you don't, the vfio-pci directory won't even exist.

Getting the card back is the inverse; unbind from vfio-pci, bind to your gfx driver ("radeon" in my case).

Important resource for /sys fuckery:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-bus-pci

You can see the entire location string of your PCI devices using

lspci -D

>>568594

>>570060

Okay, this actually gives me an idea.

>run 2 X servers

>one for dedicated GPU

>one for integrated GPU

>when starting VM, kills the X server running on the dedicated GPU

>after closing VM, restart the X server

Can't test this until I get the GPU, but is there any reason this wouldn't work?

>>569962

Startpage results show wayland was going to add GPU swapping back in 2010, but I can't find anything recent that confirms it was added or how to do it.

>>570562

Sounds like that could work, albeit a bit hacky. Is it possible to drag windows between X servers? That might be something to keep in mind when running programs in a particular X server.

bump

Want to try this. Do I need a relatively up-to-date distro, or should even Debian-based distros be okay now with software and drivers?

>>575558

Your kernel needs to support virtio or at least PCI-stub.

I recently wiped everything and went full-on Arch Linux, no partitions. Using Win7 in a VM for certain things and have had no problems, except when it comes to using a DAW and audio interface.

ASIO doesn't work, it can't open the device. But even then, I still noticed a problem. To record with the box, the guest OS needs to have the box, but to monitor, the host OS needs the box. It seems like a conundrum. But again, ASIO doesn't even work in the first place.

I'm basically sequencing in the VM and rendering it down, then importing the mixdown into Ardour and doing recording there. It works and I'm pretty happy with it.

Is there a capture card that will give me a 0-latency 1080 window of my console in my linux desktop?