[MrPowerGamerBR]

Except that if you require anything that is GPU-related (like gaming, Adobe suite apps, etc) you'll need to have a secondary GPU to passthrough it to the VM, which is not something that everyone has.

So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that people want to use that does not run under WINE do require graphics acceleration.

I tried running Photoshop under a VM, but the performance of the QEMU QXL driver is bad, and VirGL does not support Windows guests yet.

VMWare and VirtualBox do have better graphics drivers that do support Windows. I tried using VMWare and the performance was "ok", but still not near the performance of Photoshop on "bare metal".

[frollogaston]

People throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.

[sureglymop]

On linux it's quite trivial. KVM is part of the kernel. Installing libvirt and virt-manager makes it really easy to create vms.

I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.

[vvpan]

Tried doing 3d modeling in a Windows VM - couldn't get acceleration to pass through.

[voidUpdate]

What 3D modelling were you doing that couldn't be done on linux?

[robotnikman]

I'm hoping that IOMMU capability will be included in consumer graphics cards soon, which would help with this iirc there are rumors of upcoming Intel and AMD cards including it

[teaearlgraycold]

Quite a lot of people have both integrated Intel graphics and a discrete AMD/NVidia card.

[MrPowerGamerBR]

Sadly I'm not one of those people because I have a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which does not have an integrated graphics card.

However now that AMD is including integrated GPUs on every AM5 consumer CPU (if I'm not mistaken?), maybe VMs with passthrough will be more common, without requiring people to spend a lot of money buying a secondary GPU.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

AMD has SRIOV on the roadmap for consumer gpus which hopefully makes things easier in the future for gpu accelerated VMs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GIM-Open-Source

Windows can run GPU accelerated Windows VMs with paravirtualization. But I have no use case for two Windows machines sharing a GPU.

[fifteen1506]

There is also native context for VirtIO, but for now Windows support is still not planned.

Also note some brave soul implemented 3D support on KVM for Windows. Still in the works and WinUI apps crash for some reason.

[leni536]

Anything GPU related isn't great in WSL either.

[MrPowerGamerBR]

True, but I don't have the need to run applications that require GPU under WSL, while I do need to run applications that require the GPU under my current host OS. (and those applications do not run under Linux)

[hermitShell]

I don’t know why there aren’t full fledged computers in a GPU sized package. Just run windows on your GPU, Linux on your main cpu. There’s some challenges to overcome but I think it would be nice to be able to extend your arm PC with an x86 expansion, or extend your x86 PC with an ARM extension. Ditto for graphics, or other hardware accelerators

[Dylan16807]

There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?

If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.

If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.

[tyushk]

You may be interested in SmartNICs/DPUs. They're essentially NICs with an on-board full computer. NVIDIA makes an ARM DPU line, and you can pick up the older gen BlueField 2's on eBay for about $400.

[pjc50]

> full fledged computers in a GPU sized package

.. isn't this just a laptop or a NUC? Isn't there a massive disadvantage in having to share a case or god forbid a PCIe bus with another computer?

[zozbot234]

There is ongoing work on supporting paravirtualized GPUs with Windows drivers. This is not hardware-based GPU virtualization, and it supports Vulkan in the host and guest not just OpenGL; the host-based side is already supported within QEMU.

[Andrex]

I completely gave up on WINEing Adobe software but I didn't know about the second GPU thing, I thought it was totally impossible. Thank you!

I will do anything to avoid Windows but I miss Premiere.