[clug] Why virtual x86 machines?

[Hugh Fisher]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 10:45 PM Brenton Ross via linux
<linux at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> On the question of "Why bother?" I will describe my system and try to
> give my reasons.
>
> The computer is a laptop with a 6 core [12 thread] CPU, 64GB of RAM and
> a couple of large SSDs. [It wasn't cheap.]
>
> On this machine I have Ubuntu as the host OS. Its main job is to run a
> set of virtual machines using KVM QEMU and libvirt. There is a server
> VM running Centos, a general purpose VM running Scientific Linux, and
> currently Fedora on which I am doing some software development. There
> are several other VMs which currently are not running. They use a
> variety of Linux versions. [No Windows VM.]
>
> I spend my time working on several different software projects and they
> each seem to need a different variety of Linux.
...

That is a really good use of virtual x86. Now I'm looking at my developer
setup and thinking that I have too many machines, too many boot options.
Instead I should have one really high powered laptop that runs Linux and
MS Windows side by side instead of dual boot. And a third VM running
as a Hackintosh.

Do you have any experience with using GPUs in VMs? I do a lot of
graphics.

-- 

        cheers,
        Hugh Fisher