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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, wh
by MrPowerGamerBR 1y ago
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".
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoQuite a lot of people have both integrated Intel graphics and a discrete AMD/NVidia card.
- MrPowerGamerBR 1y agoSadly 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.
- mrguyorama 1y agoYes, 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.
- hermitShell 1y agoI 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
- Dylan16807 1y agoThere 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.
- hermitShell 1y agoYes, 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.
- tyushk 1y agoYou 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.
- pjc50 1y ago> 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?
- frollogaston 1y agoPeople throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.
- sureglymop 1y agoOn 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.
- Affric 1y ago“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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- frollogaston 1y agoEven the described FTP-based Dropbox replacement is easier than getting a VM to work properly with DRM'd software and/or GPU acceleration.
- skyyler 1y agoReally? With GNOME Boxes it's pretty straightforward. I hear KDE is getting an equivalent soon, too.
- frollogaston 1y agoYou 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.
- vvpan 1y agoTried doing 3d modeling in a Windows VM - couldn't get acceleration to pass through.
- voidUpdate 1y agoWhat 3D modelling were you doing that couldn't be done on linux?
- zchrykng 1y agoMostly having software better than FreeCAD, AKA everything that exists on Windows and macOS.
- rhdjebejdbd 1y agoFusion360 doesn't work on Linux. Or at least I tried multiple times and couldn't get it to work
- pona-a 1y agoReally? 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 https://github.com/cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux
- vvpan 1y agoI needed to use Rhino 3D specifically because it had an environmental simulation plugin.
- dabockster 1y agoNone of your business.
- zozbot234 1y agoThere 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.
- leni536 1y agoAnything GPU related isn't great in WSL either.
- MrPowerGamerBR 1y agoTrue, 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)
- robotnikman 1y agoI'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
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y agoAMD 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 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.
- fifteen1506 1y agoThere 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.
- Andrex 1y agoI 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.