*NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

[Deozaan]

perhaps you might find Qubes to be of interest.

-ewemoa (October 20, 2015, 11:53 PM)

It looks like Qubes also uses Xen, and therefore Windows has the same problem on Qubes. Namely, it has to emulate the hardware and therefore GPU intensive things such as games won't work very well.

[ewemoa]

Yes, AFAIU, it also uses Xen so your concern seems valid.

I wonder what the cost of verifying is?   (Specifically, that the games you are interested in really don't perform as well as you'd like.)

[Deozaan]

My understanding is that it would be like running Windows in a VirtualBox VM (or any VM), where the guest OS doesn't get direct access to the GPU so many video-intensive things would be slow or non-functional. Especially programs which try to grab fullscreen access.

I suppose I could try it out on real hardware, perhaps starting with my netbook. Though that device doesn't run much of anything smoothly, so I'm not sure it would give me any clear indication on how performance would suffer running under Qubes. I suppose it would give me experience and proof that I can actually get it set up and running, and might even answer the question if games would even run at all in such a setup.

But I don't think I'm ready or willing to try such an experience on my main, daily, productivity machine. Right now it seems very unlikely that it will pay off.

[ewemoa]

Perhaps it's not worth your time -- I think Qubes is likely to be around for a while though, so may be there'll be other reasons to try it in the future

[Deozaan]

Just a few days after we were talking about Xen, I saw this guide to installing Xen on an Odroid XU4:

http://odroid.com/do...ku.php?id=en:xu4_xen

I don't have a XU4, but it's still pretty cool nonetheless.

[ewemoa]

Didn't know there was some kind of ARM support for Xen.  Sounds neat!

  http://wiki.xen.org/...xtensions_whitepaper


Also came across:

  http://xhypervisor.org/

via:

  https://www.raspberr...php?p=357354#p357354

[ewemoa]

Put forth some effort regarding Qubes.

No real success at booting -- tried on two notebooks.  Also tried their alpha Live USB media.

Might try on a desktop at some point.

[Edvard]

@Deozaan: I've found that in many cases, Wine runs Windows games better than Virtualbox.  With Wine, at least you have access to the GPU (not perfect all the time, but it's mostly there).  I can run Trackmania Nations Forever at good-to-acceptable frame rates, where doing the same on a VirtualBox instance of XP was just short of painful.  If that's all you're looking for, give it a go, but for most mundane 'This-is-a-job-for-Windows' tasks, VirtualBox has served me just fine.  I've also tried Qemu, and it works quite well, but you really have to be a bit of a wizard with the command-line options to get the best performance out of it.

[Deozaan]

My understanding is that it would be like running Windows in a VirtualBox VM (or any VM), where the guest OS doesn't get direct access to the GPU so many video-intensive things would be slow or non-functional. Especially programs which try to grab fullscreen access [such as games].

-Deozaan (October 21, 2015, 08:30 PM)

I have some new (to me) evidence to suggest that using Windows as a guest OS actually is feasible, with near-native performance.

Here's a post from Sep 2012: HOW-TO make dual-boot obsolete using XEN VGA passthrough
Here's one from Dec 2015: HOW-TO make dual-boot obsolete using kvm VGA passthrough

So I may be looking into this topic again soon(ish).