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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • An OS or a hypervisor can run in bare metal. If I have Windows running in KVM, KVM is running bare metal but Windows isn’t. Ditto with ESXi or Hyper-V. In the case of your setup Linux and KVM are both bare metal, but Windows isn’t. KVM, ESXi, Xen are always running a privilege level above their guests. Does this make sense?

    The difference between KVM and the more conventional Type 1 hypervisors is that a conventional type 1 can’t run along side a normal kernel. So with Linux and KVM both Linux and KVM are baremetal. With Linux and Xen, only Xen is baremetal, and Linux is a guest. Likewise if you have something like Hyper-V or WSL2 on Windows, then Windows is actually running as a guest OS, as is Linux or any other guests you have. Only Hyper-V is running natively. Some people still consider KVM a Type 1, since it is running bare metal itself, but you can see how it’s different to the model other Type 1 hypervisors use. It’s a naming issue in that regard.

    It might help to read up more on virtualization technology. I am sure someone can explain this stuff better than me.


  • Yes I know GPU passthrough is possible. Almost no one does it as consumer GPUs don’t normally don’t support the virtualization technologies that allow multiple OSes to use one GPU. It’s an enterprise feature mostly. There are projects like VirGL that work with KVM and QEMU, but they don’t support Windows last I checked, and are imperfect even on Linux guests. I think only Apple Silicon and Intel integrated graphics support the right technologies you would need. Buying a second GPU is a good option, although that has it’s own complexities and is obviously more expensive. Most modern consumer platforms don’t have enough PCIe lanes to give two GPUs a full x16 bandwidth. There is a technology in Windows called GPU paravirtualization to make this happen with Hyper-V, but you have to be using a Hyper-V host, not a Linux based one. It’s also quite finicky to make that work.

    Out of interest what games are you running that don’t need GPU performance? Basically any modern 3D game needs a GPU to run well. Obviously 2D games might not, though even that varies.

    All of the above is far more complex than setting up a dual boot. A dual boot can be as simple as having two different drives and picking which to boot from in the UEFI or BIOS firmware. I don’t understand why you think that would be less complicated than a high tech solution like virtualization.

    There are basically three types of virtualization in classical thinking. Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3. KVM is none of these. With Type 1 there is no operating system running bare metal, instead only the hypervisor itself runs as bare metal. Everything else, including the management tools for the hypervisor, run in guest OSes. Hyper-V, ESXi, and anything using Xen are great examples. Type 2 is where you have virtualization software running inside a normal OS. KVM is special because it’s a hypervisor running in the same CPU ring and privilege level as the full Linux kernel. It’s like if a Type-1 hypervisor ran at the same time as a normal OS in the same space. This means it behaves somewhat like a Type-1 and somewhat like a Type-2. It’s bare metal just like a Type-1 would be, but has to share resources with Linux processes and other parts of the Linux kernel. You could kind of say it’s a type 1.5. It’s not the only hypervisor these days to use that approach, and the Type 1, 2, 3 terminology kind of breaks down in modern usage anyway. Modern virtualization has gotten a bit too complex for simplifications like that to always apply. Type 3 had to be added to account for containers for example. This ends up getting weird when you have modern Linux systems that get to be a Type-1.5 hypervisor while also being a Type 3 at the same time.


  • That’s not how that works. I think your confusing bare metal with bare metal hypervisor. The latter is meant to mean a Type-1 Hypervisor, which KVM isn’t anyway but that’s another story.

    Without GPU pass through you aren’t going to get nearly the graphics performance for something like gaming. I’ve also had issues with KVM and libvirt breaking during sleep. It’s a lot more janky than you make out.




  • I don’t know the context here because I am not American. That being said I can see it being useful that there is a record somewhere that someone has transitioned and what medical steps this involved for no other reason than their safety. Things like HRT, or any kind of surgery can have serious complications. Even gender dysphoria itself can lead to suicide. There should be some mechanism in place for Doctors to get this information quickly, and by nature that would probably involve the government. It should obviously be protected information like any other piece of medical data not available to all government workers unless it directly concerns their responsibilities.


  • Yeah it’s not always that simple. You haven’t been around long enough to see the stuff that can go wrong with installing Windows. For example I recently had Windows refuse to see both SSDs in a machine. All because of something called Intel VMD. Took me a handful of attempts before I found the problem.

    When Windows installs work they are fairly simple if long, but when they don’t work oh boy.

    The unplugging of internet to get a local account?

    Also they disabled that for Windows Home.

    Some Lemmy users are actually just wankers. I would like it if you all stopped. It’s especially great when I have people like you who probably aren’t even experienced in tech.


  • UEFI won’t boot from MBR drives unless it’s in BIOS compatibility mode. What format the drive is in isn’t determined by a firmware setting, though it can affect the boot process. I don’t think you actually understand what you are talking about here. The easiest way to install OSes both Windows and Linux is by wiping the drive, which would have solved this issue. Dual boot on single drive configurations normally have issues and will always be more complicated. It’s better to use two drives where possible in most cases. I suggest you read up on BIOS vs UEFI and how partition tables work if you want to do a complex setup like that.

    Mint is known for having older kernels and therefore not supporting the latest hardware. They have a different edition for newer computers called Linux Mint Edge edition. Something Arch derived like CachyOS or another distro using recent kernels will always have the best support for bleeding edge hardware. The CachyOS installer is also pretty friendly, though maybe not as much as Mint.


  • This isn’t true. Try Linux Mint or Ubuntu, their installers are much better. Those installers used by Fedora, RedHat, and even SUSE can be a bit weird.

    They specifically say unbloated Windows as well which while it’s not as difficult as they make out is still somewhat annoying.

    I’ve recently had a Windows installer fail to see my NVMe drives until I changed some random UEFI setting because it was missing a driver. Linux could see it just fine, as could Hirens boot.