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I ran windows under qemu, with a GPU, and a dedicated soundcard, and multi-monitor for years - even though ostensibly there was a 10-15% "overhead" due to emulation/virtualization. I had exactly zero issues, and to be quite frank i couldn't tell any difference in framerates, especially compared to my windows laptop running the same games with roughly equivalent GPUs.



Could you share a little more about your setup? I assume a linux host, and perhaps 2 GPUs with one per OS? I'm guessing it's a desktop build and not a laptop (iGPU+dGPU)?

I've really wanted to switch fully to linux, but I still use some "power" features in MS Office which apparently don't play nice on linux. Dualbooting Fedora is decent... when I can understand what's happening and don't need to go 4 layers deep every time I have a problem, unfortunately.


ryzen 3700 64GB(total), gentoo on NVME, nvidia 1060; windows on another NVME as a qcow (or whatever), nvidia 1070ti, 8 physical cores no HT, 32-48GB RAM.

you have to disable the specific GPU you want to use for another OS in the kernel command line - this means you need two different spec/brand GPUs, probably. There were some tweaks that i could probably dig out eventually, but most of what i used to troubleshoot were the archlinux wiki and forum posts pointing to blogs. However if you're just needing Office, just installing windows in qemu on literally any GPU will probably be just fine!

you can rsync the qcow to back up the entire windows OS.

for me to run games and audio software in windows my command line was:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -cpu host,kvm=off -smp 4,sockets=1,cores=4,threads=1 -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi -device vfio-pci,host=0d:00.0,x-vga=on -device vfio-pci,host=0d:00.1 -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/mnt/m2bay/ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=/mnt/m2bay/ovmf/OVMF_VARS.fd -drive file=/mnt/m2bay/windows10-01.img,id=disk,format=raw,if=none -device scsi-hd,drive=disk -drive file=/mnt/synology/iso/Windows_10-32_64_pro_home.iso,id=isocd,if=none -device scsi-cd,drive=isocd -drive file=/mnt/synology/iso/virtio-win/virtio-win-0.1.171.iso,id=virtiocd,if=none -device ide-cd,bus=ide.1,drive=virtiocd -usb -device usb-host,hostbus=1,vendorid=0x046d,productid=0xc31c -device usb-host,hostbus=5,vendorid=0x1a2c,productid=0x0042 -soundhw hda -vga none -object input-linux,id=kbd,evdev=/dev/input/by-id/usb-Logitech_USB_Receiver-event-kbd,grab_all=y -object input-linux,id=mouse,evdev=/dev/input/by-id/usb-Logitech_USB_Receiver-if01-event-mouse

you press both ctrl buttons to switch back and forth between host and guest, windows gets its own ip. Running office wouldn't require >60% of that stuff

i should note that command line is probably from the first time i got it working, i'd have to boot that machine to get the latest version


Thanks a lot! I'll come back to this when I set up my system properly.




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