QEMU 8.2 Released With New VirtIO-Sound & VirtIO-GPU "Rutabaga" Devices
www.phoronix.com
  • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
    ·
    1 year ago

    Hopefully some of this comes to Windows guests. One of the major issues right now is that Windows virtualisation isn't great. VirtualBox has GPU problems, VMware requires a lot of messing about with kernel modules if you don't use Ubuntu, if KVM/QEMU is able to make a smooth environment for Windows guests that'd help bring people in who still need Windows for the odd bit of software or two.

    I remember there was a GPU driver for Windows but that seems to have stalled?

    Edit: Cleared up why I think VMware is a bit of a mess.

    • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      ·
      1 year ago

      virtio-sound likely will eventually and ufs probably will too. the gpu driver is being worked on by a third party, but it's still using virgl so I doubt it will be very preformant

    • UnityDevice@startrek.website
      ·
      1 year ago

      If you need this frequently, I really suggest you look into GPU forwarding. I have a Windows VM setup with a second card and it works perfectly, I use it for games and CAD all the time. Figure out your iommu groups, pop a second card in your computer (and optionally a second nvme drive if you want max performance), and use virt-manager and the arch wiki to set it up.

      For accessing the machine you can use a second monitor input, or you can get a window to the machine with looking glass or moonlight. I use moonlight as it lets me play games from my laptop on the couch, and looking glass was causing windows to crash sometimes.

      It's a bit of work to set it all up but when you're done it should just be one XML file and maybe one modprobe.d config file.

      I think I've been using this for over a year now and the single pain point I encountered in all that time was maybe that usb input hotplug isn't supported, though there's ways to fix that, but I haven't bothered.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    • QEMU 8.2 adds a new "virtio-sound" device that implements capture and playback from inside a guest using the configured audio backend of the host machine.

    • A new VirtIO-GPU "Rutabaga" device that allows various abstractions of GPU and display virtualization.

    This VirtIO-GPU Rutabaga comes from the Android/CrosVM graphics stack and is intended for use with the Android Emulator on QEMU.

    QEMU documentation describes this as "virtio-balloon on steroids for Windows guests."

    • QEMU's 68k Macintosh Quadra 800 emulation can now boot MacOS 7.1, A/UX 3.0.1, Linux, and NetBSD 9.3.

    Plus support for 4K page sizes and other ongoing LoongArch enablement work.

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