Gaming with qubes

[car...@cypher.fi]

Hey.
I recently built new pc with Asus PRIME Z370-P, i7-8700k and gtx 1060. I care about privacy and security, but i would also like to game (mainly rainbow six siege and pubg).
Is my hardware even compatible?
Is it possible to game in windows 10 vm without sacrificing performance too much?
If someone has done this please post your experience and tutorial.
Thanks in advance.

[Tai...@gmx.com]

On 09/14/2018 01:34 PM, car...@cypher.fi wrote:
> Hey.
> I recently built new pc with Asus PRIME Z370-P, i7-8700k and gtx 1060. I care about privacy and security

If you really do next time don't buy a blobbed and ME'ed PC along with a
graphics card from the anti-freedom nvidia that actively prevents the
development of the nouveau open source drivers (vs amd making their own)
and adds "bugs" to prevent people from using IOMMU-GFX with geforce
cards (which wasted me 4 hours when I had a geforce card)

> but i would also like to game (mainly rainbow six siege and pubg).

Still possible.

I play the latest games at max settings in a VM with my libreboot
firmware KGPE-D16 with a RX580 (must get an 8gb+ gfx card) and 6328 cpu
(with a gpu bottleneck) The KCMA-D8 and KGPE-D16 server/workstation
boards work well with qubes 4.0 and they support
coreboot-libre+libreboot, OpenBMC[1] and of course IOMMU-GFX

They even theoretically support Crossfire xDMA in a VM, one of the cool
things that can be done is to normally use crossfire but if a friend
comes over assign the second graphics card to another VM so you can game
at the same time on the same machine.

While computing freedom is dead on x86 (new hardware is not owner
controlled) some day there will be games ported to POWER - already
people with the owner controlled libre-firmware TALOS 2 are playing
multiplayer games together on linux.

People said there would never be linux gaming - now many AAA games
support linux native!

[1](the facebook version of OpenBMC not the better ibm version found on
the OpenPOWER machines like the talos 2 but still quite usable for
secure owner controlled foss lights out remote access) note the kcma-d8
does not come with the module required to install openbmc it must be
purchased separately.

> Is my hardware even compatible?

No idea maybe, most consumer boards lack IOMMU support or it is broken.

> Is it possible to game in windows 10 vm without sacrificing performance too much?

Sure if done right it is not noticeable (ie: no stuttering or w/e) and
you only lose 1-3 FPS.

> If someone has done this please post your experience and tutorial.

I suggest reading the tutorials and information on the xen wiki or for
kvm/qemu on the vfio blog. (qubes uses xen)

I would suggest however gaming in a VM on a separate computer rather
than your qubes computer for performance, security and the fact that it
is harder to get it working on qubes apparently.

If you have any difficult questions you can't find the answer to
anywhere else let me know - I enjoy answering the hard questions.

[David Schissler]

What is IOMMU-GFX? I can't find any references to the GFX part.

[David Schissler]

It seems that its technically possible to pass a notebook dGPU into a VM but in practice very few seem to be able to do it and projects like this don't appear to be very interested in making that a turn key operation. I estimate that its just too many niches coming together for it to be easy.

[Tai...@gmx.com]

On 09/15/2018 12:01 AM, David Schissler wrote:
>
> What is IOMMU-GFX? I can't find any references to the GFX part.
>

IOMMU for Graphics, it is much more complex to assign a graphics device
than a regular device such as a NIC, HBA, etc.

[Zrubi]

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What the others describing is the ideal way:

Passing the VGA to a VM, using PCI Passthrough
It is supported by Xen itself, but not trivial to achieve in Qubes.
Moreover, your GTX 1060 will not work out of the box, thanks to nVidia.

So it might be a nice challenge to try to make it work, but this is
not the way if you just want to play games AND use Qubes ;)


The "easy way" is:
dual booting your machine.
Hence you need to sacrifice from security provided by Qubes.
And of course not so convenient to reboot several times.

aaand even if you dual boot, you will need to use your IGP for Qubes,
and the GTX for Windows. Which may involving some kind of BIOS profile
switching, and/or blacklisting the noveau driver in Qubes.

You can also make your life easier if you using separate disks for
Qubes and Windows...

- --
Zrubi
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[shizo]

Hi!:) Thanks for the information. Do you have irс? Because of stupid mails, you have to write here with thousands of different accounts, I think it would be more convenient to communicate there.

I have been using Qubes on laptops for three years and apart from creating firmware, nothing can be done about it. Decided to collect a workstation on your advice (x220, coreboot/heads)

I want to use virtualization at full capacity

Advise the video card?

Is it RX580?

I just bought :

2x CPU AMD-OPTERON-16-Core-6276 ~80 bucks :))
ASUS KGPE-D16 - 170 bucks

will she make noise at home?

I have a passive cooling of the house, radiators - is it good idea?

Is it hard to attach a video card to hvm?


I am installing it myself at home, I work in a data center, and for example I was surprised when I found out that the motherboard Supermicro has the same spi chipsets (winbond, micron, macronix)

how much memory is needed for the first time? 32-64gb?

Thanks :))