181–190 of 312 posts
FWIW, I got native windows performance on a Linux host just using virtualbox and (the key part) a virtual disk file that I manually edited to point directly to a windows partition on disk. This made it obvious that file IO was the bottleneck...
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I think you forgot to mention why you didn't like it.
It's too limiting, if you're doing the whole VFIO thing in the first place you don't really want to limit yourself to just Windows in a specific configuration. You want to have an ability to run any OS you can and pass your hardware to it. I wouldn't recommend VFIO just for gaming, there are better options.
What options? I'm interested.
I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…
Same setup here! I am running Proxmox on the host to streamline managing VMs and storage. Proxmox comes with a nice web GUI, which makes it very east to monitor system state. I have a Windows VM for gaming that owns the single Nvidia GPU. I also have a few Linux VMs for development (via VS Code remote) and media management. As far as storage goes, I don’t have anything too fancy. Proxmox is installed on an SSD. I hav…
* Are the VM image backups you mentioned, done to your pool by means of the ZFS snapshots? Or done at the file-level with rsync or similar.
* Do you make backups of the Proxmox installation? Similar as before: is Proxmox itself on a ZFS volume, so backups can be done just by doing ZFS snapshots? The installer lets me choose between an LVM-Thin + ext4, or a ZFS filesystem, and I was wondering whether to choose one or the other, for maximum convenience.
* "Proxmox is installed on an SSD": isn't that a bit wasteful? I mean, doesn't the Proxmox system just take like 1 or 2 GB at most?
I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre m910q which brings a 160GB M.2 NVMe disk, and another 320GB SSD disk... so I an in the process of deciding where to put each thing. Although for bigger storage I'm also considering if adding a 1 or 2 TB USB3 external disk would make sense (to store user backups like photos, documents, and also for the server's system backups)
I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…
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I do the vfio thing as well, do you happen to remember the registry editing you had to do to stop stuttering in games? There's a program that can set and unset all the stuff you need but evidently I deleted it. It's the only thing I am missing to build another one or rebuild the one I have. I wish I had believed it was going to work perfectly when I started and wrote everything down.
I don’t recall doing any registry edits. Most of the perf work i remember doing was on the VM side - getting the little tweaks in libvirt settings, matching vCPU topology to physical, keeping VM cores from running linux system processes with GRUB flags, using a dedicated USB controller and sound card. i think i set the MSI stuff gnif mentioned as well though it wasn’t critical for me. Generally stuttering will be res…
I'm an engineering software contractor and every client has a whole bucket load of outdated IDEs and random USB interface drivers they want me to install on my machine. Often this stuff has weird specific version dependencies, kernel level drivers that cause weird things to happen (like the computer to BSOD if you boot it up with other USB devices attached), random system level crashes, and when you go to the driver…
I would probably run proxmox if I was you and kit your device with extra peripheral cards that you pass through to the VM, with ZFS you can snapshot your vm volumes and proxmox has builtin support to do full backups and either store on your local machine or ship them off to a remote location. If you pass the GPU through to Windows you're going to be essentially native speed along with great security and flexibility.…
1: https://www.dell.com/en-au/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
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Yes, unfortunately Valorant is one that blocks VM usage... not that it has helped them any.
Anti-cheat measures end up blocking mostly the well-meaning players. I know it's sometimes too costly, but game studios should invest more on server-side security measures and mostly distrust the clients.
I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…
> most online games with anti-cheat etc. Any notable exceptions? What's the performance like compared to the same games in a native Windows install. I tried proton several months ago and I had to go back to Windows because it wasn't even close to good enough as far as compatability goes. I'd really love to abandon Windows as a desktop OS and just game in a VM though.
They banned the use of virtual machines [2] back in 2020 and their AC solution does not work on Linux.
Valve seems to be working on it [3], though their solution might be tailored to their SteamDeck hardware instead of a generic proton fix.
[1]: https://www.battleye.com/ [2]: https://twitter.com/TheBattlEye/status/1289027672186720263?s... [3]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq
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Server-side solutions don't catch all cheats. They can block actions that are impossible according to the game rules but they cannot prevent clients from disclosing too much information to the player about other players, or automating actions that are technically possible, like using aimbots.
You can definitely handle some of those situations server side (the key word being "some") with enough engineering effort. In regards to player positions: check which player locations are occluded and wouldn't be visible through the geometry, then only send the valid ones for each player. Of course, doing this on high tick servers could prove to be computationally intensive. In regards to aimbots: the clients already…