kvm-guest-drivers-windows VS quickemu

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

https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

Tl;Dr use quickemu: https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

There's also quickgui to help with launching VMs: https://github.com/quickgui/quickgui

(I've been using it for annual chores on windows)

[2] https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu/blob/0c8e1a5205...

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

Also: https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu/issues/88

Overall, don't be afraid to switch distro (use Ventoy, load a few ISOs just in case), try to make sure you have an easy way of backing up your stuff (be it with a separate /home partition, or like I do with storing everything important in a separate drive and then using symlink to make it 'appear' in their 'default' places), and you can always use VM in a pinch (consult this guide or use quickemu or gnome-boxes)

In case some things you do absolutely needs Windows, keep this guide for setting up VM in mind, or use quickemu's GUI.

VM will be shutdown automatically when it's inactive for a while. I will eventually add more distros going forward. Most distro isos are downloaded using the quickget script from the wonderful quickemu project. You may directly contribute to the upstream project to get the distro added to DistroSea.

If you want to do this super easily, check out the QuickEmu project with the QuickGUI: https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

Looks great! Does anyone know how Virter compare with quickemu?