Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads
With Windows 10 doing things like this, and Windows 7 being aggressively deprecated, I decided I finally wanted to ditch Windows as my daily driver.  It was good timing, then, that I watched the "7 Gamers 1 CPU" video from LinuxTechTips, which showed me how to do it without sacrificing gaming.<p>Most everything I use runs in Linux, and for the few things that don't I can spin up a VM.  But there's the caveat that is as old as Windows itself ... gaming.  Dual booting isn't an option for me, because I tend to run various server VMs 24/7.  I also didn't want a second tower just for Windows; that's non-ideal.  But wait!  Apparently modern CPUs have this fancy thing called IOMMU I never knew about, which lets you give direct access to PCI-E devices, like GPUs, to a VM.<p>So I bought up a 5820K, a X99 motherboard, and an extra graphics card, and away I went.  I now have Arch Linux running as the host system where I do all my work.  Windows 10 sits in a VM where it's given direct and exclusive access to a GTX 970 for graphics.  So far, things are working well and Windows runs the benchmark apps just fine.<p>The end result is that I can use Linux as my daily driver, but flip over to my Windows VM whenever I want to game.  It keeps Windows isolated, which is great from a privacy/security perspective, I don't have to dual-boot, and best of all I can spin up different VMs if I want to use the beastly GTX 970 for other work like machine learning.  Thanks to using the 5820K which has a few Xeon features in it, the entire process when smoothly.  The biggest caveat is I haven't found a DisplayPort switch yet, so I can't hook up the Windows VM to my primary Cinema monitor, and I haven't nailed down the mouse+keyboard thing yet.  QEMU's virtual mouse+keyboard doesn't normally work with these kinds of VMs, so you have to hack it in, and even then it likes to randomly stop working.  I could just grab a second set of physical mouse+keyboard but that's not ideal.  Steam Steaming will probably be the best option for now.