On the desktop front, I've been hearing about virtualizing windows on Linux with a framebuffer that maps directly to the GPU. Then you get to keep something like 95% performance. I forget what it's called, but I remember seeing a subreddit for it. FBIO?
I wasn't talking about performance, I was talking about compatibility with games. Sorry if that wasn't clear; I've edited.
Valve has been doing amazing things in this space, but for now my understanding is that it's more of a "most games will work pretty well" scenario, which is not really what I want for my primary games machine.
Well thats the perk, you get games compatibility. Windows runs in a window with direct access to the GPU. I primary Windows because of games and music software, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
As another comment points out, its called VFIO. From that subreddit: "VFIO stands for Virtual Function I/O. VFIO is a device driver that is used to assign devices to virtual machines. One of the most common uses of vfio is setting up a virtual machine with full access to a dedicated GPU. This enables near-bare-metal gaming performance in a Windows VM, offering a great alternative to dual-booting"
AFAIK, for the setup they're talking about, you do need a dedicated GPU. You blacklist it on the host, and pass it through to the windows VM.
I haven't worked in windows space in awhile though, and state changes rapidly, so there may be other options now that utilize a single GPU across host and vm without losing performance.
