No, Xen and qemu are not the same thing. But Xen uses the qemu emulator to boot Windows.bigtubbin wrote:Alright, I've been looking over this for a couple hours and my eyes keep glazing over the list and using a terminal seriously for the first time with the many restarts to check the BIOS is getting a little frustrating. This could use a cleanup or its own little Wiki page to try and show people how it works. (I've lucked out on the hardware side with an ASUS HERO Maximus 7 (8?) with the Z97 chipset, an i7 4790K, 32GB of RAM, an AMD 280x (or was it 290, I can't remember) and more than enough room spread over 2 SSDs and several HDDs.)
This tutorial seems to have information to other VM software, unless Xen and Qemu are the same thing.
It's also talking about installing Linux Mint on a VM as well, or am I reading that wrong? Is it talking about installing the Xen Hypervisor or booting into that?
I can't tell if IOMMU support has been enabled since I went and activated the VT-d in the Bios (can't tell by some of the documentation if it's the same thing or different), but can't seem to find the terminal command to see if it's activated.
And then there's something to do with shell scripts, something I haven't gotten to work right yet. Got any good tutorials on how to run them?
There doesn't seem to be a GUI that's a part of the system that allows switching or dedicating one graphics processor to something, like putting the system on Intel HD and the Windows VM to the AMD GPU. (Still haven't switched from software rendering to hardware rendering from what the pop keeps saying on every restart. I have no clue if my hardware graphics driver for both is even installed.)
What is he talking about in #2 about the LVM, something with xl toolstack, GRUB, and windows configuration files? Is he talking talking about GRUB as the physical PC itself or inside the VM?
I've been wanting to switch to linux for years, but the only thing that's held me back was that gaming still isn't well supported on this platform. Sorry for the venting, I want this to succeed since I don't want Win10's spyware on my PC.
Generally there are two ways to run Windows on Linux with hardware graphics support: Xen or KVM. Both are free as in beer. VMware offers a commercial solution, and some people reported success with it.
This tutorial describes using Xen (but you'll find references to KVM tutorials as well).
If you activated VT-d in the BIOS, it should be working. Use the dmesg command in a terminal window to see if it's listed.
Step 2 is confusing: It actually says that you should install Linux Mint using LVM partitions. It doesn't say how to install, but has a link to a tutorial. The rest under step 2 refers to Linux Mint 17. The tutorial was written for Linux Mint 16. The list under step 2 shows the differences when installing on Linux Mint 17. Each number (step) refers to a step in the installation further down in the tutorial. It's confusing, I know. I hope to be able to rewrite that one day.
GRUB is a bootloader. New motherboards use UEFI bootloader by default, but that can be changed in the BIOS. I haven't had much experience with UEFI, which is why I use GRUB. Please use whatever works for you. If you use UEFI, don't follow step 4 but adopt the UEFI configuration to make it work.
"windows configuration file" means the win7.cfg file mentioned in step 12. You need to adopt it to meet your hardware requirements and to specify the amount of CPU resources and memory you want to allocate to your Windows guest.
The reason I wrote this tutorial was to show others like you that you can run Linux on a day-to-day basis as your main OS, and start a Windows virtual machine (VM) when needed for gaming or other applications that currently only run on Windows. It's a pain in the neck to get it working, but I couldn't be more happy now that it's running smooth for more than 3 years.