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Windows on Btrfs

lilysthings.org

181–190 of 286 posts

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think exfat has recently gained support in all three platforms but it's not reliable for an internal hard drive (I think?). I've been doing this for a few years now. It just doesn't support some stuff, like permissions, but for just a pile of files, it's fine.

No symlinks, no transparent compression… there's quite a few mission things

Missing*

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#182
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest. It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows an…

Wanting to dual-boot sometimes isn't that rare, surely. And local storage for documents remains popular too. It seems to reflect the reality that serious Linux development effort has been very server-focussed for a long time.

On the contrary I have the feeling dual boot is a thing of the late 90's-early 2000's when processors didn't come equiped with virtualization extensions and virtualization was slow as hell.

Having to reboot is so inconvenient, sooner or later ina dual boot setup you leave your non-preferred env colecting dusts and cobwebs.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#184
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why haven’t such an open source application materialized after all these years?

Well you'd need to fund the cost of a kernel driver signing certificate and get it through WHQL as well. That's just for a start. So this wouldn't be something you could build yourself.

Surely you’d just need to turn driver signing off

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#185
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting to dual-boot sometimes isn't that rare, surely. And local storage for documents remains popular too. It seems to reflect the reality that serious Linux development effort has been very server-focussed for a long time.

These days probably quite rare, except for gaming. Virtualization is far more convenient.

Virtualisation is really laggy if you have no GPU acceleration, there are ways to get it working but they either need two GPUs or are still slower than native

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#186
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For performance, to use the entire RAM and CPU of the bare metal machine

The overhead of VMs, properly provisioned, is minimal these days. Even going with card passthrough just works.

That doesn’t work if you have one GPU (unless you shut down the Linux desktop which defeats the point)

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#187
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For performance, to use the entire RAM and CPU of the bare metal machine

The overhead of VMs, properly provisioned, is minimal these days. Even going with card passthrough just works.

You need a whole damn extra card for passthrough. With the price of today’s high end cards, that option seems… less than attractive.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#188

Speaking of Windows storage drivers, years ago, I managed to get Windows to boot and run entirely in RAM using some fairly obscure tools from the reboot.pro forums. I always wanted to have an immutable Windows system that I could manage like cattle. Unfortunately, setting up such a system was extremely complicated and a manual process. I am aware that Windows now has a driver called UWF that functions a bit like an o…

JFYI, nowadays (if you have enough RAM) we have a good driver that can load Windows both as a Ramdisk and as Filedisk (using a VHD or RAW image) booting via grub4dos or grub4EFI, SVBUS:

http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=21787

https://sourceforge.net/projects/svbus/

http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/SVBus/index.htm

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days probably quite rare, except for gaming. Virtualization is far more convenient.

Used to dual boot, but with the combo of steam/proton and VFIO passthrough + looking glass, it’s been really solid to just run both at the same time. File sharing between the two is pretty easy in that case, because it’s just the usual rsync/scp tools or SMB share. Although, I’ve found I very rarely need the guest for gaming anymore, more so for opening the odd Photoshop file and similar tasks.

This is where I am at now.

In 2010, used to dual boot. In 2014 or so, I switched to VFIO GPU/SSD passthrough and never booted to Windows again. In maybe 2019 or so, I pretty much stopped using passthrough even, though this is partly because I stopped playing a few games that proton didn't run (mostly because of e.g. Easy Anti Cheat, etc).

I don't even have my windows ssd installed in my tower any more, that's how little I expect to need it these days.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#190
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overhead of VMs, properly provisioned, is minimal these days. Even going with card passthrough just works.

You need a whole damn extra card for passthrough. With the price of today’s high end cards, that option seems… less than attractive.

Let alone trying to fit 2 3-slot GPUs in your machine, or have enough PCIe lanes to take advantage of them
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