Linux + Windows Gaming VM with VGA passthrough

[GrandGamer]

So I'm making this topic because I heard @Slick wants to switch to Linux as his primary OS and use Windows only for games and other things that don't work well on Linux.

 

I decided to do the same thing right after the Windows 10 launch late 2015, early 2016. I was mostly inspired by Linus' 7 Gamers, 1 CPU video.

However, I didn't want to use something like Unraid for a simple home PC, so I looked around and found out I could just do it on any normal Linux distribution through KVM.

 

What you are going to need:

• A CPU with IOMMU (Intel VT-d, AMD-Vi)
• 2xGPUs (1 of them can be an iGPU), 1 for the host Linux OS and 1 for Windows VM
• Any modern Linux distribution with proprietary drivers, preferably something based on Debian, Arch or Fedora.
• Virt-manager
• Time to fiddle around with it.

Optional:

• Synergy
• 2xMonitors
• A second keyboard/mouse to setup everything easily, which will be replaced by Synergy.

 

I've been using it for quite some time now and it's working pretty good. At first I was using an nVidia GTX 580 for my VM but it died on me recently, so I switched to a temporary RX 460 until I can get my hands on a more powerful GPU. For the Linux host I am using a GTX 260, not a very good choice since it is not supported by modern nVidia drivers.

 

I'm running any game that works on Linux, through Steam and I just boot up the Windows VM to run everything else. You can even stream the Windows only games on the Linux host through Steam, but I don't know how well that will work with FPS, Online games and such. For the VM, I was originally using Windows 10 LTSB N, but after switching to RX 460 I've had driver issues with Windows 10 so I switched back to Windows 8.1.

 

You can find a very good tutorial(for Arch and Debian distros) here, although half of the stuff explained there can be done through Virt-manager instead, which makes it much easier.

I can also write a small tutorial if people want it.

[Sawyer007]

Hi. I would be very interested in something like that from 2017. Surely some things have changed by now and I do need a step by step guide.

At the moment I'm using Windows Only dual seat desktop with ASTER. It works ok, but I would prefer a linux on demand VM solution for this without rebooting the main PC so it remains operable from a remote location. ASTER has some problems here that I was already considering to dich it and replace with a second low end PC.

 

I was looking at Antegros, Debian and even Ubuntu but dont really like unity. Something more classy.

 

my setup:

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

i7 6700k

1x 1080GTX

1x iGPU

32GB Memory

2x TV hdmi