kvm-guest-drivers-windows VS UnnaturalScrollWheels

There's mature VirtIO drivers for just about everything already, under the virtio-win umbrella: https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows

My desktop PC is using libvirt+qemu (on an Arch host. I use Arch, btw) to PCI passthru my RTX 4090 GPU to a Windows guest. I installed the guest initially with emulated SATA for the main drive. Once Windows was up and running, I installed virtio-win and the guest is now using virtIO accelerated drivers for the network interface, main disk. I'm also sharing some filesystems using virtio-fs.

So, I started configuring the PC with ubuntu desktop (since I need a GUI for my use case). Then I setup a windows KVM with this. In my use case, I want the windows VM to be always connected to a VPN (Mullvad) that has the toggle of LAN connections turned on. This is because I want to use sunshine on the KVM to stream my desktop to a firestick. This is how I have been configuring one PC till now for my family to be able to watch TV. The issue is that I cannot use sunshine or parsec cos there are no encoders in the VM, thus the performance sucks. (I could use software encoders, but I would use too much CPU for windows VM, which would make me unable to run a LLM (this was my plan) )

Note also: it just got an experimental Windows driver!

[1]https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/pull...

virtio-GPU for Windows for now is just a basic display driver, without any kind of acceleration, so there shouldn't be any difference between using it and QXL, which is fully emulated and in it, if necessary, you can increase the VRAM to be able to use high resolutions, as explained here. Note: this link is just from a quick search, I tried this for myself some time ago but my intention was not to increase the resolution but just to find out if it was possible to have some kind of 3D acceleration, as it happens in VirtualBox, but is not possible yet.

The only sorta-responsive display tech I've found is Virt with GL (3D) enabled. And if your physical box has 4k video you can forget about going anywhere near full screen with that guest VM.

I suggest you open a new issue in the repository describing this, or search if there is one open reporting the same. Also, keep in mind that as an early stage it might be a good idea to avoid copying important files using this, you could end up losing data unless you do an integrity check (recently I tried installing a game on the VM in a host directory and it didn't work. I'm thinking of an alternative or going back to using VirtualBox, since the shared folders worked very well for this purpose).

The problem was really bad with latest virtio drivers, so I downgraded to version 204, as per: https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/issues/623

For gaming, you want to use Crossover or the FOSS Whisky app. Parallels only runs Arm Windows which then emulates x86. This is much much slower than using Wine to translate system calls and Apple's Game Porting Toolkit to handle the Vulkan or DirectX graphics. Crossover and Whisky take care of the internals of those for you. Give those a shot, I think you'll find it much better than a full VM. In my experience some games do run better this way than the MacOS versions, though that's usually because the Mac client wasn't compiled for Apple Silicon and so Rosetta is emulating. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure WOW is already Apple Silicon native, so you probably won't get better performance this way.

For the mouse stuff, try a USB mouse if you're not already using one, combined with https://github.com/ther0n/UnnaturalScrollWheels

That works really well for me to get a Windows-like mouse curve.

TLDR skip the emulation and go for translation layers via Crossover, Whisky, and GPT. It'll be much faster. The mouse thing is separate and has nothing to do with the graphics layer.

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Personally though, I'd just pay $20 a month for Geforce Now. It is much much faster than even the highest end Mac.

Was the utility UnnaturalScrollWheels?

I use this tool to keep natural scrolling on trackpad and normal scrolling on my wheely mouse: https://github.com/ther0n/UnnaturalScrollWheels

A Free Tool UnnaturalScrollWheels is a MacOS app that allows you to invert the scroll direction for physical scroll wheels while maintaining the normal function for trackpads. aew3 recommends it "for those like me who go between dock and laptop and prefer my mouse to have a different scroll direction to the trackpad." Another Free Tool Locust is an open-source load testing tool that allows you to define whatever user behavior you like, and then swarm your system with millions of those users simultaneously. certTaker suggests, "If you want to test an actual application and how it handles network latency, potential buffering, QoS etc, then you could use Locust to stress-test REST-based applications and their APIs." A Tip Synssins shares a method for replacing an older Windows File Server with new, while keeping all shares and DNS intact:

UnnaturalScrollWheels is a MacOS app that allows you to invert the scroll direction for physical scroll wheels while maintaining the normal function for trackpads. aew3 recommends it "for those like me who go between dock and laptop and prefer my mouse to have a different scroll direction to the trackpad."

“For some reason in macOS, toggling the "Scroll direction: Natural" option in Mouse settings also changes it in Trackpad settings despite being in separate places.” Check out this app too which also takes care of acceleration. https://github.com/ther0n/UnnaturalScrollWheels