How do you run Virtual Machines on EndeavourOS?

5 posts were split to a new topic: Virtual machine can’t connect to the internet, using VPN

Another qemu/kvm video but note that the poster isn’t using systemd:

Hello World,

I’ve been reading through EndeavourOS discovery like @ddnn suggested in another thread and I got to the VM(something I am very interested in using in the future) section and I have a question about this specific line that stood out to me:

KVM can be used with QEMU which allows virtual machines to be run nearly to native speeds.

Is this really true?! I mean I don’t know much about VM’s, never had to use one before, but one thing I do remember learning about them since forever is that you take a HUGE performance impact…

Is that no longer the case, is it antiquated information? Could I really fire up a game like say Cyberpunk 2077(or VR games) inside a VM and have it work just as good as if I was runing it on the native/installed OS?!

P.S. I’m sorry if this has been talked about before, but I’m not gonna read through the billion posts this thread seems to have, I may be curious, but I’m not that curious… :wink:
I read the first few replies, didn’t seem to touch on it, so I figured I’d ask.

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It depends on which virtualization solution and what you are specifically doing.

To get good GPU performance in a VM, you need to pass a physical GPU through to the VM. Then the GPU operations will be running natively on the actual GPU.

Woow, cool. Ok, I’ll research that part more when the time comes. Thank you. :upside_down_face:

@VIKINGS I have currently setup such environment with virt-manager (qemu) passing my nvidia 3060 to it if the host is powerful with lots-a-ram and lots-a-cores it runs very smoothly… Not tested such high resource hungry game like cyberpunk but as the GPU is used directly I do not feel any difference. Also it will not the same as with normal VMs in my case i have two GPUs so host uses different display and input devices… Could be it is possible to work around this.

Uuummm, well there sure as heck better be a way to work around that, as I don’t/won’t have 2 gpus!(unless you count the onboard one) :frowning:
And I definitely can’t/don’t want to use multiple monitors or input devices.

As far as ram and cores go I will have 32GB of fairly fast ddr5 and a 7800X3D, not sure if that is considered “lots-a” or not… :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

You can count the onboard one. You could use the onboard one for your daily tasks and pass the dedicated one to a VM if you wanted to do that for some reason.

Single GPU passthrough is possible but it is kind of a pain.

You can work around the need for multiple monitors using Looking Glass. It is an application that provides fast access to the VM in a Window.

You don’t ever need multiple input devices.

PHEW! Ok, that doesn’t sound too bad at all. :grin:

Want easy mode? Try Quickemu. Just a few clicks and you’ll have the OS of your choosing up and running in a VM. If you need GPU passthrough or something, you’ll need to tune some things.

Personally I use Qemu/KVM/VFIO. I’ve got a windows 11 virtual machine and I bind/unbind my dGPU to it when ever the VM is started or shut down. Performance is quite decent, but it required some tuning to get it just perfect. Don’t even need another monitor for it, LookingGlass/KVMFR has quite good performance to display what ever is going on in the virtual machine on my desktop.

I use a single keyboard and mouse with both systems. Ctrl + ctrl will switch between host and guest. Works really great. This method is called evdev passthrough.

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Hopefully this is the right place … I am going to get a new main system and convert it to EOS. My current system has an SSD with Win7 on it. I found an article that said one could import an existing disk into a VM, but it was written for Debian/Ubuntu so I just wanted to double check and see if this also worked in the Arch ecosystem. Thanks.

Yes it works. Quite easy to do at least with Virt-Manager (QEMU GUI).

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