Sounds like I am not the only tek syndicate fan in here!

This week I tried to set up a KVM windows appliance with vfio passthrough to setup a high performance gaming virtual machine on my Linux box. I had everything, a CPU with vt-d and vt-x, 2 graphics card BUT my machine was a laptop with an integrated GPU. So I did everything that I could, following multiple guides only to find out that trying to passthrough a dedicated GPU and conserving the integrated one for Linux caused some problems because the IGP automatically takes the “vga slot” which is the slot you want to passthrough (and you want to have your dedicated GPU in that slot).

That means that when you start the VM, it says that your device does not support the x-vga option. Luckily to solve this issue, there are several kernel patches, that are not official AND not updated/do-not-work anymore, for me at least.

While remaining a failure, that experience was instructive and if i’m building a desktop in the near future, i’ll make something crazy with kvm and xen ( 4 graphics card: 1 nvidia for linux 2 nvidia in SLI for kvm and 1 amd in xen just for fun… Or i will just take 3 nvidia card for kvm or something like that. ) Note that this method can help create a multi-headed gaming pc, for lan parties and whatnot with each screen having a different input stream because with kvm you can passthrough any device listed in the command lspci: usb hubs (peripherals), wifi cards, sound cards,… isn’t that wonderful!

I’ve also thaught about making an external gpu so that my kvm setup would work but i’m not ready to take the risk to “ruin” a gpu for fun (says the guy that wanted an amd xen passthrough for fun when he hypothetically already had a kvm nvidia SLI :) But if anyone has any experience/success in setting up external gpu’s on linux laptops, he can feel free to share it, i won’t bite ^^ Oh and since i’m stealthly calling for help, if anyone knows a workaround for km gpu passthrough on laptops having a 1 dedicated and 1 integrated GPU, feel free to share it too!

Last week I had to face some data corruption, on my MAIN rig, the laptop above, of course I never backed-up any data, cauz' ain’t nothin' can happen to me, well I was obviously wrong. But don’t think it was due to my system, my drive or anything, no, it was simply me not resizing the file system before resizing a partition., that’s the kind of stupid stuff that happens to me…

Otherwise, I’m still working on the terminal client of Lutris, an open source gaming client. It’s in python so, it’s pretty straight forward, but that helps me get better in programming and designing nice curse interfaces. That’s about it :)

Note tat, a huge chunk of my week was my exam session, high school everyone :). So everything mentionned here happened during the week-end or the week before…

Last week, I’ve been working on my desktop setup, I have redone it from the grown up, I used to use ArchLinux but this time, switched to NixOs, which is a linux distro that enables you to configure nearly every part of your system declaratively! That means that you “script” your linux distro, want a new wm, just add:

services.xserver.windowManager.herbstluftwm.enable = true;

to your configuration.nix and then run ~# nixos-rebuild switch Here you are with a shiny herbstluftwm, but that’s just a wm, it’s easy one might say… No problem, you’ve just set up a super encrypted hardrive partition using LVM? No need to mess up with initramfs, grub, efi,… just type:

boot.initrd.luks.devices = [{name = “root”; device = “/dev/sda2”; preLVM = true;}];

boot.initrd.kernelModules = [“fbcon”];

boot.loader.gummiboot.enable = true ;

boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true ;

There are automatic “backups” of your configs, Oooh! You don’t boot anymore? The thing you just seted up does not work? Just select the precedent entry in your boot manager !

Yes, it also works during the installation process, just write 10 to 30 lines and poof your setup is done, configure that and you are in ! That’s it, and all the configuration is like that, it obviously has some drawbacks, believe it or not but configuring your systrem declaratively requires an entire mind shift, for example NixOs stores packages in /nix/store, which is read only, the /etc/ part of your system is not meant to be edited by the user, instead you should use the /etc/configuration.nix (one of the rare file you will use in /etc). So, that means you can’t use the archwiki’s nice docs to configure a “system wide” program, (use local confs ~/.*) you have to use the NixOs’s user manual, which is really well done when you wrap your mind around it. It’s kind of hard at first, but luckily the iRC channel on freenode is called #nixos and is super helpful. The nix package manager follows the same declarative concept, and is used by nixos.

A new NixOs user might be totally derouted with so much purity: “What !? my packages don’t put their sh** in /usr and /bin ? How am i going to manually compile with the gcc ?!!!!” The answer is just to write a package using the nix lang, which is a nice high level scripting language, than you can setup packages/build for the nixos, when you are finished. Go read about it ! https://www.nixos.org

All in all even if it’s new, is lacking some packages, and has at first a feeling of inflexibility NixOs has huge advantages, (that i have mearly stated , go read the link and explore the wiki to find out more :) It’s a super cool distro, and you should try it…

And after that i configured everything, (through ~/.config and ~/.whateverrc) and yes that took me a week, i like to rice my environnement, here is a screenshot: *Was actually meant to be posted on /r/unixporn but you got it first! don’t mind the cocky-reddit-karma-whoring title http://imgur.com/a/FNBgE

:)