Arch Linux

zipsu

Member

Registered: 2021-01-11

Posts: 1

qemu/kvm

This may not be the right way to ask for things here, but I'm looking for some tips on how to create an arch based qemu/kvm host machine that has a win 10 guest for games and some application while arch will be used as the daily driver. I'm not new to arch, but I haven't done something like this before and the documentation online is very chaotic. Since i'll be building a new machine, what kind of hardware config would be ideal? Does it need two ssd's (one for host, one for guest) and two gpus, or one is fine (probably cant switch between the two OS's this way, but would it work?). Or maybe there is a good guide somewhere for a basic setup that I can tweak further?
Thank you in advance!

RagnarOlafsson

Member

Registered: 2021-01-11

Posts: 14

Re: qemu/kvm

It is none of my business, however I feel an urge to ask. Why do you need gaming in virtual machine and why you've specifically choosen qemu/kvm? Majority of titles can be played through Wine, Proton or Wine + DXVK which deliver fixes for new titles very quickly and generally it's a very active community. If you still want to game through GPU passthrough, it is doable. IMHO it is not needed nowadays.

As for the hardware config, it is generally a good idea to have powerful multithreaded CPU, such as the new AMD Ryzens. No need for hard-drive. When creating new virtual machine, you will have to allocate specific part of your hard drive for the virtual machine. The more space on SSD, the better.  You can read about the prerequisities for GPU Passthrough on the Arch Wiki.

For the actual setup, you can use some GUI tools such as Gnome Boxes, Virt-Manager etc. You will however need to set up networking as well which is possible to do only through command line (you'll probably use NAT for that).

Last edited by RagnarOlafsson (2021-01-12 08:18:01)

rowdog

Member

From: East Texas

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 118

Re: qemu/kvm

The usual setup is to use two GPUs to do PCI passthrough
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PC … h_via_OVMF