Multi OS help wanted

[Karai17]

Hello! I've been watching LTT for a few months now and felt like this community might be able to help me with an interesting idea. I plan to built  anew PC this year, probably in Q3 when Skylake-E and Pascal are likely to be released. My main OS for the last few months has been Linux, and I am quite happy with it, but there are still some reasons for me to want to run Windows (Windows-only games, Adobe software, etc). My main issue is that I am lazy and don't want to have to constantly reboot my pc every time I want to play a game or edit a photo. Even with SSDs, it's still a pain to do, and pulls me out of other software I have running on Linux. So what I'd like to do, if at all possible, is run both Linux and Windows at the same time on my machine and have some simple way to swap between them on the fly. Since E chips don't have onboard graphics, I suspect I'll need two video cards. Something beefy for the Windows VM (a fancy new Pascal card), and something usable for the Linux VM (some cheap card like a GTX 720 or whatever). I don't know yet if I plan to buy a hex core or an oct core CPU, but I suspect an oct core split in half would be ideal?

 

Ultimately I don't know much about this sort of build, so any insight would be appreciated. Maybe I don't need to dedicate the GPU to a single VM, but can allocate it on the fly? Maybe not? I don't know. While I know I need the beefy graphics capabilities on Windows, I would also like to have it available on Linux if possible, as I do some game development as a hobby and would prefer to do that in a Linux environment.

 

I hope this post is somewhat coherent. If not, feel free to ask me to explain anything in more detail. Ultimately what I would like to have is some sort of switch that I can flip that would send my monitors and input devices (and gpu?) over to Windows, and then flip it again to pull everything back to Linux.

 

Thanks~

[BenR31415]

Pretty difficult.

I'm not too sure on the specifics, however you will need to use VMs which are a pain to set up, and they use more RAM than chrome, and that is saying something.   

What you could do is use a separate PC (laptop, etc) if you don't want to reboot every time, you would just need to swap keyboard + mouse around (you wouldn't need to do it with your monitor unless you have an ASUS PG278Q

[Karai17]

Well, buying a gaming laptop would just double my budget, which is not ideal. I don't really mind buying a bunch of RAM, RAM is one of the cheaper components to stick in a machine.

[Streetguru]

1 hour ago, Karai17 said:

 

Should go with AMD for the passthrough, Nvidia cards require some extra steps to virtualize as they try to prevent you from doing so on non quadro cards

 

You'd also only need a single VM running windows, and a skylake i7 even would be fine, as you'd basically have 2 i3s if you're going 100% on the VM which is more than enough for gaming
 

 

[Karai17]

This actually looks like what I want to do. Could you give me more information on the NVIDIA issue? I have been burned a lot by AMD in the past and would really prefer an NVIDIA card.

 

Edit:

 

According to this thread ( https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=37495.0 ) it looks like the fix is somewhat simple, and doesn't do much to hurt performance.

[Streetguru]

50 minutes ago, Karai17 said:

 

Error Code 43, and ya, nvidia hates your freedom

 

aside from that what card were you going to buy? because the 380 and 390 are both faster than the 960 and 970 in their price brackets.

[Karai17]

If I were to buy today, I'd be buying a 980 Ti. But I plan to wait for Q3 to pick up a 1080 Ti or Titan Pascal, depending on price and other factors. Rumours are spreading that the 1080 won't have the promised HBM2, but instead GDDR5X which is a let down, but apparently "Big Pascal" will have HBM2. I'm patient enough to wait and see, but I'd like to have a game plan ready.