[clug] Why virtual x86 machines?

[Brenton Ross]

The host machine also has a quite nice Nvidia GPU.
I have not been able to work out how to access it from the VMs. The
instructions I have found are way too scary for me to attempt.

[If anyone has a straightforward way of doing it I would love to hear
about it.]

For the few things that need it [Blender and MeshLab] I just use the
host machine.

Brenton

On Fri, 2020-08-21 at 11:03 +1000, Hugh Fisher wrote:
> 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.
>