kvm-guest-drivers-windows VS swtpm

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

Or you can just add a virtual tpm device in virt-manager while setting up the vm using swtpm. It seems to ha e packages on most major distro's.

If you want Windows 11 instead for whatever reason, swtpm can emulate a TPM chip for QEMU to use.

You can find the source of software TPM implementations which abide to the official spec such as: https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm but that has no real bearings on the TPM used on real hardware

I install swtpm and in virt-manager add a TPM 2.0 emulated device and set the secure boot image before I install. This seems to work well enough.

I don't know either, but apparently Microsoft didn't guarantee that 'unsupported' systems would continue to receive system updates. I just use a QEMU VM and swtpm.

swtpm - a software Trusted Platform Module emulator and the ways of using it;

Seems there are two such projects for that:

https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm

This should work: https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm/wiki

Linux has several TPM emulators. This one is probably the most popular. But here's another for TPM 1.2 only. The main use-case is to emulate TPMs for use with Virtual Machine guests.

Other GitHub posts from previous versions seem to have the issue described here but maybe I missed something, https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm/issues/572 I'm on an arch install and just installed it from pacman.