{Guide} Create a Gaming Virtual Machine - Page 52

Hi, i made more progress using duet, i modified the source to boot always from the hdd (duet doesnt keep efi variables) and installed rEFInd on the image, this allows me select the media i want to boot from a pretty menu, here are some screenshots i took, i had to disable gpu passthru ( gfx_passthru=0 ) to take the shots, but it works just fine when its enabled, usb keyboard and mouse work too

Here's duet recognizing my usb pendrive with windows 7 installer:



Booting windows 7 installer from the pendrive (xen_platform_pci = 0):



Duet recognizing my sata dvd drive:



Booting Fedora 17 beta installer from the sata drive:



Fedora 17 on UEFI mode, on XEN.



My cfg file:

EDIT: Sucess!, i managed to dump the AMD RAID UEFI driver from memory, it loads just fine on DUET and i can boot windows from the controller on raid mode on xen!, here's
the .efi file for anyone interested.

RaidX64.efi.zip 79k .zip file
duet.img.zip 3410k .zip file
Edited by nbhusain - 1/22/13 at 6:04pm

I just bought a i7 3770.

What are the basic features and benefits of VM?

I tried reading some articles online, but most of them lost me with their explanation.

The most important benefit in our case, in my opinion, is that it eliminates the need for dual booting for those of us who wish to use Linux as their primary system, but still want to game.

But there are many other benefits, such as making it easy to backup entire systems. It also eases the development of new programs since you can test it on a number of OSs with very little trouble, and another benefit is that services can be separated from one another, minimizing possible conflicts since one service can't interfere with the other.

There are other benefits too, such as testing beta software without compromising your main system, and using it as a sandbox against viruses and other malware (windows mostly)

I had mentioned before that my local network file transfer speeds were sub-optimal. I've tried many different configurations, and finally it seems to work. I've written down the steps (to the best of my knowledge) here:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=112013&p=679098#p679098

From 4.5Mbyte file transfer speed via a Gigabit link I'm now up to around 25-26MByte. The Fast Ethernet link to my media streamer shows also a nice improvement. Hope this helps anyone.

That looks very nice! Not sure I asked this question before, but do you see a difference in performance of Windows under Xen versus normal boot? Such as disk / file transfer speed, graphics performance, etc.

@ Powerhouse

If by normal boot you mean passing the raw disk (ex: disk = [ phy:/dev/sdb ] ) yes its a lot faster than using an emulated controller with gplpv, like i already mentioned, it bypasses the dom0, since the controller ( in my case its device 00:11.0 amd sb controller) is managed by the domU, and its using native drivers on windows.

As for native boot vs xen boot, no, i dont see any difference at all except in the cpu performance, as i have 2 cores pinned to dom0, and 6 cores pinned to domU, this setup is as close to metal as possible with the exception of the net device, i guess you could passthrough a net device and it will be almost 100% native performance.
Edited by nbhusain - 1/28/13 at 5:30pm

Actually I meant booting directly into Windows versus Windows VM on Xen. The way I understood you is that you have Windows installed on disk and can dual boot into Windows, as well as boot into Linux/Xen and run Windows in a VM. Or have I completely lost you?

My Windows is installed on LVM, that is disk = [ 'phy:/dev/mapper/lm13-win7,hda,w'...], same as yours except LVM. According to the Xen wiki and other documentation, LVM is supposed to offer the best performance. Well, I can't complain, though I've nothing to compare with since all my disks/partitions are LVM, except /boot of course. Some disks are LVM striped for RAID0 performance, which works very well.

Maybe it was confusing so ill try to explain again, i have 2 sata controllers integrated on my mobo, one is the amd sb one, and the other one is an asm1062. My first disk is connected to the asmedia controller, that disk contains my linux installation with xen, the second disk i have contains my windows installation, and its connected to the amd controller along with a sata dvd drive.

07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Cayman PRO [Radeon HD 6950]
07:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Cayman/Antilles HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6900 Series]
00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 40)
04:00.0 USB controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB Host Controller
05:00.0 USB controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB Host Controller
06:00.0 USB controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB Host Controller
00:16.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:16.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller


As u can see from my cfg file,what i do is, i pass the duet image (disk = [ 'file:/root/xen/img/duet.img,hda,w' ]) as a disk, this disk DOES NOT contain my windows installation, it just contains duet and refind which is an efi bootloader, i do not pass my real disk to xen, what i do is, i pass the entire controller (00:11.0 which like i said contains a REAL disk with windows installed + a sata dvd drive). Duet then picks up the controller, finds my disk which contains windows and the dvd drive and boots from it. My setup is just one disk im not using lvm or raid, but like i mentioned i managed to dump from memory the driver for my controller when i switched it to raid mode, and it works on duet, it finds the real disk and i can boot from it, tho i did not try to create a raid0 setup with it because i only got 1 disk. As for performance this method should be NATIVE fast since the entire controller is managed by the domU, i hope this answers your questions .

And yes with this setup you can dual boot.
Edited by nbhusain - 1/29/13 at 4:59pm

@ nbhusain: Thanks for the detailed explanation. I think I got it now .

I already got my Windows VM running on an LVM volume and see no reason to change that. But your method looks like a good way to convert a Windows PC or dual boot PC into a Xen box with Windows running on a VM. Hope to be able to try that on a friend's PC (he's got the right hardware for it). Need to do some reading on duet and how to read the SATA controller ROM.

I'm a little familiar with refind and used it before, until I discovered that Xen doesn't support UEFI (until recently - kernel 3.7 is supposed to solve that). Rod the developer/maintainer is a great guy, always there to help.

You dont need the rom for the sata controller as long as it is on ahci mode and even then, you would need an efi driver, one easy way to check if this works for you is using the duet image i provided and passing your sata controller to the vm, if it picks up your disk your good to go.

Xen does actually support uefi, im using xen-4.1.4 and kernel-3.6.11 on arch and i can boot just fine, or you could just boot linux in legacy mode and with duet you'll still be able to boot windows on xen on uefi mode with duet.
Edited by nbhusain - 1/29/13 at 8:09pm