Website Guide: christitus.com/windows-inside-linux Setting up QEMU in Linux: christitus.com/vm-setup-in-linux/ Past QEMU Install Video: ua-cam.com/video/Kq849CpGd88/v-deo.html
i would realy like to se how you set up vm for gaming. I have tried it from before never worked out, and also it was something to with cpu to connect to the vm
Good video, I am old school and i like mail, please stop beating on it, its a good app. Tried doing this with virtual box several years ago it was a real mess
@@nicholaswjamrock Yeah I understand many like the minimal design and how they made mail. I'll try to keep the hatred out for it. I generally hate most UWP design and Microsoft Store Apps in general, but mail is one of the best in that category.
FYI, one should set up CPU topology manually in the VM settings page since virt-manager (or QEMU) assigns one socker per vCPU core but Windows 10 Pro only supports 2 sockets. So if you don't set up topology manually, Win 10 only sees 2 CPU cores.
@Kyle Miller According to a Reddit answer, the frequency is controlled by host CPU policies. By default, the frequency should go up when running CPU-intensive tasks. You could use a system monitor like bpytop to check CPU load and frequency on the HOST.
Wow, you included some steps and recommendations that I never would have thought about, frankly. I am definitely going to build a Windows 10 VM using QEMU/KVM. This was really informative.
Really looking forward to a video on GPU pass-through. For Windows gaming specifically. Level 1 Techs had teased doing one and referenced using Looking Glass but nothing ever seemed to come of it.
Look at poor shamed computer by ordinary gamer. I based my vfio rig on it and work like a charm. But I don't understand why he doest use virtio qcoe drives instead of whole disk..
For truly great VM performance on KVM/QEMU, configure CPU pinning and set the host and guest to run on different cores. Also, GPU passthrough will allow for full baremetal graphics performance and hardware accelerated graphics performance. Obviously you'd need multiple GPUs to be able to passthrough a GPU physically, but it works great (allowing for gaming with baremetal performance on the VM). You CAN run with a single GPU, but then you have to close out the linux window manager when launching the VM (using hooks scripts), but it still gives you the benefit of a virtual windows VM and linux hypervisor running in the background. I've been running this way for months and prefer this over baremetal installations.
Can confirm. Subdivided a 13900k into four windows vm each with GPU pass through. Each runs faster than i7 8700 and has GPU acceleration Cpu pinning is the only way to really utilise cpus with non homogeneous cores for vm
Nice timing on this video! I've been a long time Windows user and have been dabbling with Linux in recent months. I'd like to switch over fully, but I'm also an avid gamer. I wanted to set up a Windows VM with GPU passthrough to accommodate that, but it can be tough finding the info you need. Looking forward to the next video on this.
@@kytv9000 It's viable for sure and I have used it. I like the Windows VM for the sake of ease of gaming/modding and for use of apps not available on Linux for which I have no alternative. I know I could dual boot, but I think the VM is cooler.
As Johnny Lawrence would say: badass! This is the video I was looking for. Not for running Windows, but to get to know about how to use VMs properly on my desktop from a professional. Thank you Chris.
What i personally like to do when i need to use windows vm is i just run it in headless mode and RDP into it with remmina, and its pretty seamless, also you can enable the multimonitor mode in remmina so it feels just like native experience.
You are awesome Chris! I was thinking about trying something like this on my rig as I built this thing for Gaming / graphics editing. I wanted to get on Linux full time and use Windows as a gaming VM. Can't wait till you put out the Video on Passthrough to the graphics card. This whole guide has helped me understand how the process should work.
Love this. Can't wait to see your video passthrough tips. I have a Hades Canyon running Linux and I've yet to successfully do video passthrough on it no matter what guides I follow. Your video may not help my particular situation, but more info is always good.
What you're explaining about your setup of fully accelerated Windows and Mac with a full Linux enviroment just sounds like a perfect PC solution for every type of task!
Chris, you most probably don't read this but... You have a GREAT CHANNEL; I really enjoy what you are doing. Just one thing. In the corporate world, we still have 5%-10% of OS running on bare metal. There are many use cases where that is still required. Or where the technology don't work with VMs.
I haven't bothered with Windows at home in so long that I never thought about these settings. This is some really good info and could be a good option for those who are making the switch to Linux but can't completely let go of Windows yet.
Exactly my situation. Knowing the bottlenecks and workarounds in default VM installs is always useful, even if I'm just testing look-and-feel before Linux distro hopping.
You could/should have made the storage in the 1st example virtio based, which performs way better than the generic SATA controller. You just have to load the driver during the install. If you're going to pass physical disks though, I think its considered better practice to use '/dev/disk/by-id' because /dev/sd* can sometimes shift around.
That's exactly what I did. This should be higher. Also you don't need to dedicate the entire hard drive you can do this with a single partition as well. One problem I have is windows detects my ssd as hdd and I haven't been able to fix this. 'winsat formal' should trigger a change but it does not fix. (this happened with installing to .qcow on ssd as well) I disabled defrag in the mean time.
Went out and bought an SSD drive today (way cheaper than they were 2 years ago I see) as Windows would not install on an empty partition. Well worth it as instead of the minutes my VM used to take to start up, mine is also starting now in 15 or 20 seconds. Thanks these tips really made it usable again.
When you did the comparison I think you should have left RAM & CPU exactly the same during both tests so that you were comparing the differences only between qcow2 & raw disk. In addition, the qcow2 file test should have been done on the exact same hard drive as the raw test.
Love it!!!! I'm a VirtualBox user and my problem is I run VirtualBox on old laptops with not a lot of "horsepower". lol Anyway, it's good to know about these tips. Thanks for posting!!!!
OK Chris, trying to work through this. I think I got the QEMU part done (the copy the commands links are very helpful). The directions on your "Setting Up Windows Inside Linux" kind of broke down at the "Optimizing Windows VM" part. Directions are kind of sketchy there. What am I supposed to do? The GitHub page is quite confusing.
Great video Chris. Can't wait for the video passthrough. I watched another tutorial that implied only Nvidia worked so I am excited to see the 5700xt passthrough. Keep up the great content!
Great video, depending on the purpose of the windows vm sometimes I also do 1)Disable search services, 2)Disable automatic windows update, 3)disable antivirus after I have installed everything that I need.
This is a great guide, thank you! How do you recommend sharing a directory between the host and guest? None of the options I've found have been great (samba, experimental virtio-win drivers, NFS, just use VirtualBox)...
Samba is pretty straightforward. I bridged my Ethernet connection with nmtui and now my vm is using my LAN. I just enter my samba share without problems, and with my other windows machines in my house too. it's very good because I have my things on my main linux server to distribute to the rest of windows and linux pcs
Thanks for doing this video Chris - it's a real help. I've wanted to replace Windows entirely with Linux, but there's a few programs I just can't do without and no real alternative on Linux at present. But I've struggled getting Virt-Manager working on Linux and only used Boxes because it was so much easier to use. I'll give Virt-Manager a go again and see how I go. Cheers
@@gorgnof Not particularly. I'm still dual booting. However I'm a little more wiser about virtual machines. What I've learned: - Each VM has their own idiosyncrasies. - Some Linux distros seem to work better on certain VM's - You still need to basically copy your working files to the virtual drive and then back again or you risk corruption. - Nowadays with an SSD, it really doesn't take that long to just dual boot back into Windows for those couple of tasks - Windows still sucks huge donkey nuts
I was watching Son of a Tech for crypto and your video was recommended afterwards. I did not know I needed you in my life. I have been binge watching your videos--so informative. I love you.
This could be much better! Use a LVM pool, add a VirtIO SCSI controller and attach the storage to that. That way you don't need dedicated hardware but you get pretty much bare metal hardware. Also, EFI secboot is a piece of cake using libvirt! :)
One video showing how optimize for games would be great!! Since i switched to Linux about 3 years ago i rarely play Killer Instinct (game i like a lot but i don't play anymore because i need to dual boot everytime i want to play) and this games is a Microsoft Store one. hehe. Thanks for all the content you make by the way!
Coming Soon, I just bought a 5700XT used mining card to passthrough to vm's (mainly doing it for MacOS as I want to use Final Cut Pro inside a VM), but should be able to show the Windows side of this as well.
@@ChrisTitusTech Do you only have 1 brand of card, or do you have both nvidia and AMD? I have a 1660 super, but when i replace the card with a 5500XT, and start my display manager, I only get a flashing cursor, i tried removing nvidia drivers and replacing them with AMD drivers, that didn't work, i tried the hybrid drivers, and those didn't work either. I would ultimately like both cards in my system, but I can't get the AMD card to display anything besides a tty. I also have the same problem with my integrated graphics, only my nvidia card works, no display from anything else.
@@ArawnFR With my nvidia card i get output fine, with drivers, but i only get a tty with my igpu, or the AMD card, with or without prop drivers, or noveau drivers.
Yes please make this whole category as a whole series of optimizing VMs and choosing + configuring storage machine type bios type all that for each type of VM
Oh my god thank you, I've been scouring the internet for literal years looking for the right way to set up VMs, always leading to dead ends and me going "well I don't really need windows that badly anyways" while hyperventilating copium xD Big, BIG thank you 👍
Very helpful. The speed of delivery challenged my ability to notice transitions; especially from the side-pinned details pane and the popout for adding new hardware. But quite helpful. Thanks.
Yes please do the GPU passthrough. I live in Linux and use Virtualised Windows. However the problem is running Ableton Live 11, it lags a bit. I found that VMware didn't suffer the same as KVM.
Thank you Chris. Another great video really helpful insight into VM Windows on Linux. Sick of the background downloads and updates taking out my work environment which is Windows 10. Using Win 10 for the reasons you explained in your video. I need Windows 10/11 to test network connections and programs. Now I can stay in Linux (I'm a nubie) do the system/network set up and use Windows to test after the updates are done. FYI. on more than one occasion I could not use my Laptop for over 4 hours while Windows updated at a customer site.
Thanks for the video. Really simple. I am quite interested about the dual graphic card setup. Not only the installation, but the hardware selection too.
I feel like this could've been done better, there's a difference between optimizing a completely virtualized system vs passing through large portions of your host hardware and you could've made that much more clear. For most people not trying to game on their VMs you don't need 8 cores and 10GB of RAM to make a functioning and decently performant Windows VM, you can get away with much less than that with a SPICE display, the Virtio Drivers and the Guest Agent.
Awesome video, now I know why it was slow damn slow, last time I did this. Be interesting to see GPU pass through and gaming. Have you looked into Looking Glass project?
4:50 - @chris Titus tech Question: in Proxmox I have a host with 6 cores, and I'm able to allocate 6 cores to (currently) 3 VMs without issues... Is this a difference in how the software is allocating that hardware vs the software you're using here? Thanks for the vid!
Chris, Irecently found your channel. As a PC Technician troubleshooting Windows professionally for 11 years and heavily steep in hardware configurations, I say, it's a rarity to find a youtuber that knows, in detail, what he or she is talking about. Anyway, my interest here is possibly leveraging your intimate knowledge to determine the minimal Linux support needed to run qemu, with and without virt-manager. If the challenge sounds fun to you, would you do a video on that setup" perhaps on Arch?
My VM setup actually have me start VMs from my login screen and pass through my amd gpu to my VM, when i shut down the VM i am back at the linux login screen, there is also a windows 10 VM running in the background at all times meaning my MacOS VM and windows11 VM and steamOS VM can access it through moonlight if i need to play a windows only game that is on that VM. i would love to show you that setup someday 🤣its kinda crazy PS: newest macOS also has support for RX 6600XT and i think any cards above that
Wow, great info! I always thought that one day our computers would be powerful enough to run Windows gaming through Linux. I didn't think we were there yet. Your video gives me hope that I will never need Windows for gaming again some day.
Using RDP and remoting into the VM is also a lot faster because Windows has optimizations for running over network connections and offloads some of the rendering to the client, which benefits from the host's GPU capabilities. So things like moving windows around and opening menus is much snappier. QXL is great but on anything past Windows XP, it's a display-only driver so all the rendering is done in software and taxing on the CPU. RDP bypasses a good chunk of that, but there's just no way to get good video acceleration on Windows without some form of GPU passthrough (be it full passthrough, or GVT-g or SR-IOV). QXL with 3D acceleration for Linux VMs on the other hand is awesome, basically as smooth as running natively. Can even run games! (Although OpenGL only for now, Vulkan is still WIP).
I'd use virtio driver for storage too, but you have to do it before installing or windows is gonna crap itself, you also need to add the virtio drivers iso and manually choose the driver or it won't show up
it also works on a partition, for example I have only one disk and I have Linux on it and if I create a partition of, for example, 50GB and install Windows on the partition, I would partition the disk via GParted live cd, would that work? I would be happy if so
Thank you very much for this video was very helpful. What took me a week to try and do had it done in 30 mins lmao. Once again thank you for great video
hi chris! great video! i've been having some issues, how can i virtualize a nvme drive with win10 already installed? i keep getting bluescreens on boot with virt-manager and virtualbox, i'm following similar steps for pci passthrough...
Chris I have a question ... windows host virtualbox as vm and windows 10 guest the sound is very choppy what do you recommend to solve audio issues especially when using a DAW the audio performance is really crappy ... Thx
Hiii great video as usual!!!!, do you think that use a volume or partition of the disk for all the VM's is going to have the same final result as you did with direct disk? Thanks in advance for all
Hi Chris. Thanks for the detailed explanation. That is really helpful! I just got a question on the harddrive. Can I also use my primary M2 SSD and use a partition of that drive? Or do I really need an entire physical drive? Thanks!
I have a problem with software that requires opengl 3.3 to run. Do you know a way to make this work? Been searching for a solution the whole day, but can't find one
Great video Chris, very informative. Soon enough I dont have to use my work computer at all, the only thing holding me back in Linux is the vpn we are using at my company, not working natively on linux yet. This might fix that, thanks
I just got a steam deck. I'm interested to see what would be your perspective in this specific case (one ssd, ram size, number of cpu cores, runnin inside gaming mode to use the steam overlays, etc), it might be applicable to a lot of people with the same standard hardware.
Realize it might be a bit of an older video by now but have a question! When you say "pass through" the HDD, it seems you've just dedicated an SSD to it (which is nice on a desktop). If you were to store the storage file on say an NVME (say on a laptop where an additional drive would be harder), do you think the performance would be crazy different?
Excellent tutorial / walkthrough Chris, thank you! I am currently using Oracle VirtualBox for my Windows 10 and it works pretty good. Are there advantages to using QEMU for virtualization in Linux? I am currently using Fedora 36 as my host.
I've done all that you have done in this video. Installed the drivers, added the guest channel AND made sure it was connected, made sure the correct VirtIO controller was recognized, and whatever else. It seems to work really well except for the mouse is really choppy and slow. I'm wondering if this is just how it is and I'm just being too picky or if I'm somehow missing something. I ended up just turning off the display and using Remmina to connect but that's a whole other step making me feel like I did something wrong earlier.
I enjoyed the video. Help me to understand: is Linux better hardware-wise than a PC? I know that depends. But, I've been a PC guy for over 30 years. I'd like to branch into Linux, but not sure where/how to begin. So with this video, your goal is to make Linux your base, then have VMs for PC and Macs?
Basically, yes to all. If you want to branch into Linux, though, I'd advise you to try different distros and desktop environments first in a VM. There's a whole world of them, and they all are great for something, you only have to find the one that fits your needs. For destop environments, check KDE if you're used to windows, but if you're on a laptop, Gnome is the way to go. For distros, I like Fedora very much. I use Nobara right now, which is Fedora optimized for gaming out of the box. Manjaro is a good one for trying Arch, and finally, Zorin OS is a good distro "for grandma". If my mom can use it, anyone can. Those are the ones I can vouch for. Have fun.
Yaaa 🎉!!! I just updated my Omen 17 laptop and can set up a virtual windows to run Scrivener!!! I had Windows 10 when I first opened it, so now I will have to run Powershell to get my product key from the Bios. I am sure it’s hiding there.
Butter R fast! 🤣. BTW this is great, well layed out and explained! Went to sub and was already subbed must of seen something a while ago I liked and didn't come accross you again till I searched out windows inside linux, today. Anyway appreciate the effort you put into this! Very helpful.
I'm actually working on the polish needed to make that happen. Won't be monthly though. It takes a ton of time to do that video. Probably about 10-20 times the amount of time to do any other video. Currently, I'm creating a bunch of automated scripts for the UI you see in my videos so more people can use that.
@@ChrisTitusTech Will be eagerly waiting for scripts for new UI. Loved your awesome wm theme. Also wanted to let you know that the rofi theme in your awesome config (titus-awesome) doesn't work anymore(tried multiple times on debian and arch both). If you could update it then that would be great because it gives the feeling that there was something wrong with the installation.
The only problem i usually have on my network with non school vms is that my windows xp instances are slow to switch from one or the other from the machine theyre running on. Theyre running on virtualbox on windows 10. These were the only vms that were hard to get running on my antsle. The physical machine now has 380gb of hard drive in 2 drives, and 2gb ram. Thats pretty good performance for those specs.
Installing on qcow is also pretty fast, as long as you configure it in virt-manger as a VirtIO disk and load the VirtIO drivers during install , which is kinda a not straight forward process. The advantage of doing installation on a qcow is due to snapshot or backup capabilities or you can just move the Windows install to a different machine, without pulling an entire drive.
Website Guide: christitus.com/windows-inside-linux
Setting up QEMU in Linux: christitus.com/vm-setup-in-linux/
Past QEMU Install Video: ua-cam.com/video/Kq849CpGd88/v-deo.html
i would realy like to se how you set up vm for gaming. I have tried it from before never worked out, and also it was something to with cpu to connect to the vm
If you will put the vm on a dedicated harddrive, why not just baremetal install win on the second harddrive for even more speed and dual boot?
Do you suggest Debian over Manjaro?
Good video, I am old school and i like mail, please stop beating on it, its a good app. Tried doing this with virtual box several years ago it was a real mess
@@nicholaswjamrock Yeah I understand many like the minimal design and how they made mail. I'll try to keep the hatred out for it.
I generally hate most UWP design and Microsoft Store Apps in general, but mail is one of the best in that category.
I'm running Chrome OS Flex inside Window Subsystem for Linux 2 running inside a Windows 11 VirtualBox on a Steam Deck (which runs Arch, btw).
Run arch in chrome os and customize it to look like steam os
I've been waiting for that lil powerful machine for days and valve still hasn't sent me a confirmation email 🤨
Such a flex
so useless 😂😂😂
Flexing at its peak
Thank you SO much for making an easy guide. There's so many confusing tutorials regarding VM performance that this is a breath of fresh air
FYI, one should set up CPU topology manually in the VM settings page since virt-manager (or QEMU) assigns one socker per vCPU core but Windows 10 Pro only supports 2 sockets. So if you don't set up topology manually, Win 10 only sees 2 CPU cores.
Thank you… I’m wondering why my shit seems so unreasonably slow when I allocated 8 sockets.
@Kyle Miller According to a Reddit answer, the frequency is controlled by host CPU policies. By default, the frequency should go up when running CPU-intensive tasks. You could use a system monitor like bpytop to check CPU load and frequency on the HOST.
Wow, you included some steps and recommendations that I never would have thought about, frankly. I am definitely going to build a Windows 10 VM using QEMU/KVM. This was really informative.
Really looking forward to a video on GPU pass-through. For Windows gaming specifically. Level 1 Techs had teased doing one and referenced using Looking Glass but nothing ever seemed to come of it.
Look at poor shamed computer by ordinary gamer. I based my vfio rig on it and work like a charm. But I don't understand why he doest use virtio qcoe drives instead of whole disk..
Hey man, Mental Outlaw did a very nice tutorial on GPU passthrough with Virt-Manager.
You dont even need two gpu's for gpu passthrough with an nvidia card these days
@@notuxnobux I know! Good times to be in linux
@@notuxnobux do you need 2 GPU with AMD cards ?
this video litteraly came out the moment i needed to make a windows VM for school, thank you so much for the help and keep it up chris!
For truly great VM performance on KVM/QEMU, configure CPU pinning and set the host and guest to run on different cores. Also, GPU passthrough will allow for full baremetal graphics performance and hardware accelerated graphics performance. Obviously you'd need multiple GPUs to be able to passthrough a GPU physically, but it works great (allowing for gaming with baremetal performance on the VM). You CAN run with a single GPU, but then you have to close out the linux window manager when launching the VM (using hooks scripts), but it still gives you the benefit of a virtual windows VM and linux hypervisor running in the background. I've been running this way for months and prefer this over baremetal installations.
Can confirm. Subdivided a 13900k into four windows vm each with GPU pass through. Each runs faster than i7 8700 and has GPU acceleration
Cpu pinning is the only way to really utilise cpus with non homogeneous cores for vm
it's only useful if you don't have a potato for a pc like most of us. @@harrytsang1501
Nice timing on this video! I've been a long time Windows user and have been dabbling with Linux in recent months. I'd like to switch over fully, but I'm also an avid gamer. I wanted to set up a Windows VM with GPU passthrough to accommodate that, but it can be tough finding the info you need. Looking forward to the next video on this.
also i'm looking forward to this! would like to use fedora as main OS, and using windows using kvm just to play my games
For gaming performance, I guess using Wine/lutris/proton solution are still better.
@@kytv9000 It's viable for sure and I have used it. I like the Windows VM for the sake of ease of gaming/modding and for use of apps not available on Linux for which I have no alternative. I know I could dual boot, but I think the VM is cooler.
What timing! I just spun up a Win10 VM with virt-manager yesterday, so I'll be trying those settings. Thanks Chris!
Literally subscribed for that pass through video, this was so incredibly well explained and I can’t wait for that one.
As Johnny Lawrence would say: badass!
This is the video I was looking for. Not for running Windows, but to get to know about how to use VMs properly on my desktop from a professional.
Thank you Chris.
What i personally like to do when i need to use windows vm is i just run it in headless mode and RDP into it with remmina, and its pretty seamless, also you can enable the multimonitor mode in remmina so it feels just like native experience.
this is actually a big brain solution
virt-viewer is also good
I thought of that too, but couldn't get it working - Spice WebDAV server on guest and Remmina on host.
Your video is pure GOLD. Many tips that was dispersed you joined in this tutorial. I'm installing with your recommendations right now.
You are awesome Chris! I was thinking about trying something like this on my rig as I built this thing for Gaming / graphics editing. I wanted to get on Linux full time and use Windows as a gaming VM. Can't wait till you put out the Video on Passthrough to the graphics card. This whole guide has helped me understand how the process should work.
Thank you so much! This is probably the only understandable video on UA-cam about the performance of virtual machines!!
I've been waiting for this video for a long time! Ever since you said you live in Linux and virtualize windows and mac.
Love this. Can't wait to see your video passthrough tips. I have a Hades Canyon running Linux and I've yet to successfully do video passthrough on it no matter what guides I follow. Your video may not help my particular situation, but more info is always good.
Thank you Chris. You explained so well, I have never used QEMU/KVM. It looks awesome!
What you're explaining about your setup of fully accelerated Windows and Mac with a full Linux enviroment just sounds like a perfect PC solution for every type of task!
Chris, you most probably don't read this but...
You have a GREAT CHANNEL; I really enjoy what you are doing.
Just one thing. In the corporate world, we still have 5%-10% of OS running on bare metal. There are many use cases where that is still required. Or where the technology don't work with VMs.
I haven't bothered with Windows at home in so long that I never thought about these settings. This is some really good info and could be a good option for those who are making the switch to Linux but can't completely let go of Windows yet.
Exactly my situation. Knowing the bottlenecks and workarounds in default VM installs is always useful, even if I'm just testing look-and-feel before Linux distro hopping.
You could/should have made the storage in the 1st example virtio based, which performs way better than the generic SATA controller. You just have to load the driver during the install. If you're going to pass physical disks though, I think its considered better practice to use '/dev/disk/by-id' because /dev/sd* can sometimes shift around.
That's exactly what I did. This should be higher. Also you don't need to dedicate the entire hard drive you can do this with a single partition as well. One problem I have is windows detects my ssd as hdd and I haven't been able to fix this. 'winsat formal' should trigger a change but it does not fix. (this happened with installing to .qcow on ssd as well) I disabled defrag in the mean time.
@@balsalmalberto8086There is an option for the VM config to emulate a SSD, that would pass to windows.
THANK YOU MY BROTHER FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY AND ANOTHER FAMILY!!!
Thanks
That was a cracking video! Incredibly useful. Thanks Chris. I’ll be doing this as soon as I can.
Went out and bought an SSD drive today (way cheaper than they were 2 years ago I see) as Windows would not install on an empty partition. Well worth it as instead of the minutes my VM used to take to start up, mine is also starting now in 15 or 20 seconds. Thanks these tips really made it usable again.
Thank you for sharing your preferences and the reason for them. It is a big help to us newbies!
When you did the comparison I think you should have left RAM & CPU exactly the same during both tests so that you were comparing the differences only between qcow2 & raw disk. In addition, the qcow2 file test should have been done on the exact same hard drive as the raw test.
This is exactly what I was thinking of doing. Chris you are awesome!
Love it!!!! I'm a VirtualBox user and my problem is I run VirtualBox on old laptops with not a lot of "horsepower". lol Anyway, it's good to know about these tips. Thanks for posting!!!!
im glad im still subbed to this channel. between you, and wendell, the world has so many ways to do full fat windows virtualization on linux
OK Chris, trying to work through this. I think I got the QEMU part done (the copy the commands links are very helpful). The directions on your "Setting Up Windows Inside Linux" kind of broke down at the "Optimizing Windows VM" part. Directions are kind of sketchy there. What am I supposed to do? The GitHub page is quite confusing.
Great video Chris. Can't wait for the video passthrough. I watched another tutorial that implied only Nvidia worked so I am excited to see the 5700xt passthrough. Keep up the great content!
Great video, depending on the purpose of the windows vm sometimes I also do 1)Disable search services, 2)Disable automatic windows update, 3)disable antivirus after I have installed everything that I need.
This is a great guide, thank you! How do you recommend sharing a directory between the host and guest? None of the options I've found have been great (samba, experimental virtio-win drivers, NFS, just use VirtualBox)...
Samba is pretty straightforward. I bridged my Ethernet connection with nmtui and now my vm is using my LAN. I just enter my samba share without problems, and with my other windows machines in my house too. it's very good because I have my things on my main linux server to distribute to the rest of windows and linux pcs
Thanks for doing this video Chris - it's a real help.
I've wanted to replace Windows entirely with Linux, but there's a few programs I just can't do without and no real alternative on Linux at present. But I've struggled getting Virt-Manager working on Linux and only used Boxes because it was so much easier to use. I'll give Virt-Manager a go again and see how I go. Cheers
did it go good
@@gorgnof Not particularly. I'm still dual booting. However I'm a little more wiser about virtual machines. What I've learned:
- Each VM has their own idiosyncrasies.
- Some Linux distros seem to work better on certain VM's
- You still need to basically copy your working files to the virtual drive and then back again or you risk corruption.
- Nowadays with an SSD, it really doesn't take that long to just dual boot back into Windows for those couple of tasks
- Windows still sucks huge donkey nuts
Another great informative video! Virtualization is so interesting. I would love to see more videos live this. I use Arch btw lol
Thank you so much man!! been watching your videos since 2021 it's crazy that I still learn a lot from you
Thanks Chris, the best guide ever for qemu and windows. I really appreciate all your hard work.
I was watching Son of a Tech for crypto and your video was recommended afterwards. I did not know I needed you in my life. I have been binge watching your videos--so informative. I love you.
Your VM has more resources than my laptop, no doubts it is smooth
Excellent video as always. Keep up the excellent work.
If I pass through a partition instead of an entire disk will I still experiment performance improvements?
This could be much better! Use a LVM pool, add a VirtIO SCSI controller and attach the storage to that. That way you don't need dedicated hardware but you get pretty much bare metal hardware. Also, EFI secboot is a piece of cake using libvirt! :)
One video showing how optimize for games would be great!! Since i switched to Linux about 3 years ago i rarely play Killer Instinct (game i like a lot but i don't play anymore because i need to dual boot everytime i want to play) and this games is a Microsoft Store one. hehe. Thanks for all the content you make by the way!
Coming Soon, I just bought a 5700XT used mining card to passthrough to vm's (mainly doing it for MacOS as I want to use Final Cut Pro inside a VM), but should be able to show the Windows side of this as well.
@@ChrisTitusTech Do you only have 1 brand of card, or do you have both nvidia and AMD? I have a 1660 super, but when i replace the card with a 5500XT, and start my display manager, I only get a flashing cursor, i tried removing nvidia drivers and replacing them with AMD drivers, that didn't work, i tried the hybrid drivers, and those didn't work either. I would ultimately like both cards in my system, but I can't get the AMD card to display anything besides a tty. I also have the same problem with my integrated graphics, only my nvidia card works, no display from anything else.
what about with only one gpu ?
@@ArawnFR With my nvidia card i get output fine, with drivers, but i only get a tty with my igpu, or the AMD card, with or without prop drivers, or noveau drivers.
@@littlek3000 yeah but you can’t access your gpu on your host and vm unless you unload your graphics card on the host, that’s the real hard part
Yes please make this whole category as a whole series of optimizing VMs and choosing + configuring storage machine type bios type all that for each type of VM
Oh my god thank you, I've been scouring the internet for literal years looking for the right way to set up VMs, always leading to dead ends and me going "well I don't really need windows that badly anyways" while hyperventilating copium xD Big, BIG thank you 👍
Very helpful. The speed of delivery challenged my ability to notice transitions; especially from the side-pinned details pane and the popout for adding new hardware. But quite helpful. Thanks.
Yes please do the GPU passthrough.
I live in Linux and use Virtualised Windows. However the problem is running Ableton Live 11, it lags a bit. I found that VMware didn't suffer the same as KVM.
This is awesome Titus! How much horse power does the host machine have?
Thank you Chris. Another great video really helpful insight into VM Windows on Linux. Sick of the background downloads and updates taking out my work environment which is Windows 10. Using Win 10 for the reasons you explained in your video. I need Windows 10/11 to test network connections and programs. Now I can stay in Linux (I'm a nubie) do the system/network set up and use Windows to test after the updates are done. FYI. on more than one occasion I could not use my Laptop for over 4 hours while Windows updated at a customer site.
Thank you Chris, very informative and useful video!
Thanks for the video. Really simple. I am quite interested about the dual graphic card setup. Not only the installation, but the hardware selection too.
You sir, are amazing! Thank you so much for this tutorial. One question, what hardware are you running? Thanks
I feel like this could've been done better, there's a difference between optimizing a completely virtualized system vs passing through large portions of your host hardware and you could've made that much more clear. For most people not trying to game on their VMs you don't need 8 cores and 10GB of RAM to make a functioning and decently performant Windows VM, you can get away with much less than that with a SPICE display, the Virtio Drivers and the Guest Agent.
Awesome video, now I know why it was slow damn slow, last time I did this.
Be interesting to see GPU pass through and gaming.
Have you looked into Looking Glass project?
Thank you so much Chris! Your videos have helped, and I have learned a lot!
Yes, please! An episode on how to debloat win 10 trash! God bless you!
4:50 - @chris Titus tech Question: in Proxmox I have a host with 6 cores, and I'm able to allocate 6 cores to (currently) 3 VMs without issues... Is this a difference in how the software is allocating that hardware vs the software you're using here? Thanks for the vid!
Nice video.
I like the username, fits well with windows 🤣
Chris, Irecently found your channel. As a PC Technician troubleshooting Windows professionally for 11 years and heavily steep in hardware configurations, I say, it's a rarity to find a youtuber that knows, in detail, what he or she is talking about. Anyway, my interest here is possibly leveraging your intimate knowledge to determine the minimal Linux support needed to run qemu, with and without virt-manager. If the challenge sounds fun to you, would you do a video on that setup" perhaps on Arch?
Would be cool if you could do this for macOS kvm too
I actually have a dedicated GPU incoming to passthrough so I can move my Final Cut Editing inside a Mac VM.
My VM setup actually have me start VMs from my login screen and pass through my amd gpu to my VM, when i shut down the VM i am back at the linux login screen, there is also a windows 10 VM running in the background at all times meaning my MacOS VM and windows11 VM and steamOS VM can access it through moonlight if i need to play a windows only game that is on that VM.
i would love to show you that setup someday 🤣its kinda crazy
PS: newest macOS also has support for RX 6600XT and i think any cards above that
Awesome video.. again.. Thanks for your efforts mate..👍
what a hearty video for all beginners!
Great video. I absolutely love your content.
Btw if you don't mind can you explain the rational behind spice vs virtio display.
The true windows subsystem for Linux
Wow, great info! I always thought that one day our computers would be powerful enough to run Windows gaming through Linux. I didn't think we were there yet. Your video gives me hope that I will never need Windows for gaming again some day.
Using RDP and remoting into the VM is also a lot faster because Windows has optimizations for running over network connections and offloads some of the rendering to the client, which benefits from the host's GPU capabilities. So things like moving windows around and opening menus is much snappier.
QXL is great but on anything past Windows XP, it's a display-only driver so all the rendering is done in software and taxing on the CPU. RDP bypasses a good chunk of that, but there's just no way to get good video acceleration on Windows without some form of GPU passthrough (be it full passthrough, or GVT-g or SR-IOV).
QXL with 3D acceleration for Linux VMs on the other hand is awesome, basically as smooth as running natively. Can even run games! (Although OpenGL only for now, Vulkan is still WIP).
I'd use virtio driver for storage too, but you have to do it before installing or windows is gonna crap itself, you also need to add the virtio drivers iso and manually choose the driver or it won't show up
it also works on a partition, for example I have only one disk and I have Linux on it and if I create a partition of, for example, 50GB and install Windows on the partition, I would partition the disk via GParted live cd, would that work? I would be happy if so
Thank you very much for this video was very helpful. What took me a week to try and do had it done in 30 mins lmao. Once again thank you for great video
hi chris! great video! i've been having some issues, how can i virtualize a nvme drive with win10 already installed? i keep getting bluescreens on boot with virt-manager and virtualbox, i'm following similar steps for pci passthrough...
Chris I have a question ... windows host virtualbox as vm and windows 10 guest the sound is very choppy what do you recommend to solve audio issues especially when using a DAW the audio performance is really crappy ... Thx
Hiii great video as usual!!!!, do you think that use a volume or partition of the disk for all the VM's is going to have the same final result as you did with direct disk? Thanks in advance for all
Hi Chris. Thanks for the detailed explanation. That is really helpful! I just got a question on the harddrive. Can I also use my primary M2 SSD and use a partition of that drive? Or do I really need an entire physical drive? Thanks!
I have a problem with software that requires opengl 3.3 to run. Do you know a way to make this work? Been searching for a solution the whole day, but can't find one
Awesome video I will try it out. Please also a GPU passthrough video next. 🙂
You a smart man Chris! Thank You
that's super great! thx for that! Just a question, what if I don't have a spare drive, would separate partition work?
Hi Chris I got a question , how to work with proxmox? , thank you
Great video Chris, very informative.
Soon enough I dont have to use my work computer at all, the only thing holding me back in Linux is the vpn we are using at my company, not working natively on linux yet.
This might fix that, thanks
I just got a steam deck. I'm interested to see what would be your perspective in this specific case (one ssd, ram size, number of cpu cores, runnin inside gaming mode to use the steam overlays, etc), it might be applicable to a lot of people with the same standard hardware.
Congratulations on your one box solution.
Thank you, Chris. Like keeping a skunk under your porch. Seriously though, good information.
Realize it might be a bit of an older video by now but have a question! When you say "pass through" the HDD, it seems you've just dedicated an SSD to it (which is nice on a desktop). If you were to store the storage file on say an NVME (say on a laptop where an additional drive would be harder), do you think the performance would be crazy different?
Excellent tutorial / walkthrough Chris, thank you! I am currently using Oracle VirtualBox for my Windows 10 and it works pretty good. Are there advantages to using QEMU for virtualization in Linux? I am currently using Fedora 36 as my host.
I've done all that you have done in this video. Installed the drivers, added the guest channel AND made sure it was connected, made sure the correct VirtIO controller was recognized, and whatever else. It seems to work really well except for the mouse is really choppy and slow. I'm wondering if this is just how it is and I'm just being too picky or if I'm somehow missing something. I ended up just turning off the display and using Remmina to connect but that's a whole other step making me feel like I did something wrong earlier.
I enjoyed the video. Help me to understand: is Linux better hardware-wise than a PC? I know that depends. But, I've been a PC guy for over 30 years. I'd like to branch into Linux, but not sure where/how to begin. So with this video, your goal is to make Linux your base, then have VMs for PC and Macs?
Basically, yes to all. If you want to branch into Linux, though, I'd advise you to try different distros and desktop environments first in a VM. There's a whole world of them, and they all are great for something, you only have to find the one that fits your needs.
For destop environments, check KDE if you're used to windows, but if you're on a laptop, Gnome is the way to go.
For distros, I like Fedora very much. I use Nobara right now, which is Fedora optimized for gaming out of the box. Manjaro is a good one for trying Arch, and finally, Zorin OS is a good distro "for grandma". If my mom can use it, anyone can.
Those are the ones I can vouch for. Have fun.
GREAT VIDEO as usual Chris!
Can you run Mac OS and its applications on Linux?
Thanks for the guide! Did you ever got Single GPU Passthrough working?
Excellent as usual !!
Yaaa 🎉!!! I just updated my Omen 17 laptop and can set up a virtual windows to run Scrivener!!! I had Windows 10 when I first opened it, so now I will have to run Powershell to get my product key from the Bios. I am sure it’s hiding there.
Butter R fast! 🤣. BTW this is great, well layed out and explained! Went to sub and was already subbed must of seen something a while ago I liked and didn't come accross you again till I searched out windows inside linux, today. Anyway appreciate the effort you put into this! Very helpful.
Hey great video Chris. Thoughts on continuing the monthly Linux rice series?
I'm actually working on the polish needed to make that happen. Won't be monthly though. It takes a ton of time to do that video. Probably about 10-20 times the amount of time to do any other video.
Currently, I'm creating a bunch of automated scripts for the UI you see in my videos so more people can use that.
@@ChrisTitusTech Will be eagerly waiting for scripts for new UI. Loved your awesome wm theme.
Also wanted to let you know that the rofi theme in your awesome config (titus-awesome) doesn't work anymore(tried multiple times on debian and arch both). If you could update it then that would be great because it gives the feeling that there was something wrong with the installation.
I love watching you do these amazing installs but it goes right over my head, I'm the peasant that uses windows mail, I don't know any better.
The only problem i usually have on my network with non school vms is that my windows xp instances are slow to switch from one or the other from the machine theyre running on.
Theyre running on virtualbox on windows 10. These were the only vms that were hard to get running on my antsle. The physical machine now has 380gb of hard drive in 2 drives, and 2gb ram. Thats pretty good performance for those specs.
Chris, we have been working on a linux "wrapper" to place around windows.
Installing on qcow is also pretty fast, as long as you configure it in virt-manger as a VirtIO disk and load the VirtIO drivers during install , which is kinda a not straight forward process. The advantage of doing installation on a qcow is due to snapshot or backup capabilities or you can just move the Windows install to a different machine, without pulling an entire drive.