Website Guide: christitus.com/windows-inside-linux Setting up QEMU in Linux: christitus.com/vm-setup-in-linux/ Past QEMU Install Video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gddoZ5x01a3IaGw.html

I'm running Chrome OS Flex inside Window Subsystem for Linux 2 running inside a Windows 11 VirtualBox on a Steam Deck (which runs Arch, btw).

Thank you SO much for making an easy guide. There's so many confusing tutorials regarding VM performance that this is a breath of fresh air

Wow, you included some steps and recommendations that I never would have thought about, frankly. I am definitely going to build a Windows 10 VM using QEMU/KVM. This was really informative.

FYI, one should set up CPU topology manually in the VM settings page since virt-manager (or QEMU) assigns one socker per vCPU core but Windows 10 Pro only supports 2 sockets. So if you don't set up topology manually, Win 10 only sees 2 CPU cores.

Really looking forward to a video on GPU pass-through. For Windows gaming specifically. Level 1 Techs had teased doing one and referenced using Looking Glass but nothing ever seemed to come of it.

Literally subscribed for that pass through video, this was so incredibly well explained and I can’t wait for that one.

Your video is pure GOLD. Many tips that was dispersed you joined in this tutorial. I'm installing with your recommendations right now.

this video litteraly came out the moment i needed to make a windows VM for school, thank you so much for the help and keep it up chris!

What timing! I just spun up a Win10 VM with virt-manager yesterday, so I'll be trying those settings. Thanks Chris!

That was a cracking video! Incredibly useful. Thanks Chris. I’ll be doing this as soon as I can.

You are awesome Chris! I was thinking about trying something like this on my rig as I built this thing for Gaming / graphics editing. I wanted to get on Linux full time and use Windows as a gaming VM. Can't wait till you put out the Video on Passthrough to the graphics card. This whole guide has helped me understand how the process should work.

Thank you so much! This is probably the only understandable video on KZfaq about the performance of virtual machines!!

Love this. Can't wait to see your video passthrough tips. I have a Hades Canyon running Linux and I've yet to successfully do video passthrough on it no matter what guides I follow. Your video may not help my particular situation, but more info is always good.

This is exactly what I was thinking of doing. Chris you are awesome!

Great video Chris. Can't wait for the video passthrough. I watched another tutorial that implied only Nvidia worked so I am excited to see the 5700xt passthrough. Keep up the great content!

Thank you for sharing your preferences and the reason for them. It is a big help to us newbies!

Nice timing on this video! I've been a long time Windows user and have been dabbling with Linux in recent months. I'd like to switch over fully, but I'm also an avid gamer. I wanted to set up a Windows VM with GPU passthrough to accommodate that, but it can be tough finding the info you need. Looking forward to the next video on this.

Excellent video as always. Keep up the excellent work.

As Johnny Lawrence would say: badass! This is the video I was looking for. Not for running Windows, but to get to know about how to use VMs properly on my desktop from a professional. Thank you Chris.

Awesome video.. again.. Thanks for your efforts mate..👍

Another great informative video! Virtualization is so interesting. I would love to see more videos live this. I use Arch btw lol

im glad im still subbed to this channel. between you, and wendell, the world has so many ways to do full fat windows virtualization on linux

Thank you so much Chris! Your videos have helped, and I have learned a lot!

Thank you so much man!! been watching your videos since 2021 it's crazy that I still learn a lot from you

Thank you Chris, very informative and useful video!

Went out and bought an SSD drive today (way cheaper than they were 2 years ago I see) as Windows would not install on an empty partition. Well worth it as instead of the minutes my VM used to take to start up, mine is also starting now in 15 or 20 seconds. Thanks these tips really made it usable again.

I've been waiting for this video for a long time! Ever since you said you live in Linux and virtualize windows and mac.

Thank you Chris. You explained so well, I have never used QEMU/KVM. It looks awesome!

Thanks for the video. Really simple. I am quite interested about the dual graphic card setup. Not only the installation, but the hardware selection too.

THANK YOU MY BROTHER FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY AND ANOTHER FAMILY!!!

Very helpful. The speed of delivery challenged my ability to notice transitions; especially from the side-pinned details pane and the popout for adding new hardware. But quite helpful. Thanks.

Excellent as usual !!

Yes please make this whole category as a whole series of optimizing VMs and choosing + configuring storage machine type bios type all that for each type of VM

What you're explaining about your setup of fully accelerated Windows and Mac with a full Linux enviroment just sounds like a perfect PC solution for every type of task!

Great video, depending on the purpose of the windows vm sometimes I also do 1)Disable search services, 2)Disable automatic windows update, 3)disable antivirus after I have installed everything that I need.

Thanks Chris, the best guide ever for qemu and windows. I really appreciate all your hard work.

For truly great VM performance on KVM/QEMU, configure CPU pinning and set the host and guest to run on different cores. Also, GPU passthrough will allow for full baremetal graphics performance and hardware accelerated graphics performance. Obviously you'd need multiple GPUs to be able to passthrough a GPU physically, but it works great (allowing for gaming with baremetal performance on the VM). You CAN run with a single GPU, but then you have to close out the linux window manager when launching the VM (using hooks scripts), but it still gives you the benefit of a virtual windows VM and linux hypervisor running in the background. I've been running this way for months and prefer this over baremetal installations.

Thank you Chris. Another great video really helpful insight into VM Windows on Linux. Sick of the background downloads and updates taking out my work environment which is Windows 10. Using Win 10 for the reasons you explained in your video. I need Windows 10/11 to test network connections and programs. Now I can stay in Linux (I'm a nubie) do the system/network set up and use Windows to test after the updates are done. FYI. on more than one occasion I could not use my Laptop for over 4 hours while Windows updated at a customer site.

Thank you so much for this informative stuff

Thanks for the video!

Love it. I'm considering something similar for myself with GPU passthrough so I can test and switch between various media editing software

Love it!!!! I'm a VirtualBox user and my problem is I run VirtualBox on old laptops with not a lot of "horsepower". lol Anyway, it's good to know about these tips. Thanks for posting!!!!

Great work Thank you

Thanks for doing this video Chris - it's a real help. I've wanted to replace Windows entirely with Linux, but there's a few programs I just can't do without and no real alternative on Linux at present. But I've struggled getting Virt-Manager working on Linux and only used Boxes because it was so much easier to use. I'll give Virt-Manager a go again and see how I go. Cheers

Chris, you most probably don't read this but... You have a GREAT CHANNEL; I really enjoy what you are doing. Just one thing. In the corporate world, we still have 5%-10% of OS running on bare metal. There are many use cases where that is still required. Or where the technology don't work with VMs.

You a smart man Chris! Thank You

Butter R fast! 🤣. BTW this is great, well layed out and explained! Went to sub and was already subbed must of seen something a while ago I liked and didn't come accross you again till I searched out windows inside linux, today. Anyway appreciate the effort you put into this! Very helpful.

Your VM has more resources than my laptop, no doubts it is smooth

Sweet. Thanks!

Thanks Chris. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an amd 9 7950x and a nasty new gpu and running windoze as a guest for gaming. Now that I know it’s possible I wanna go all in on the one Linux box to rule them all!

Awesome video I will try it out. Please also a GPU passthrough video next. 🙂

Great video Chris, very informative. Soon enough I dont have to use my work computer at all, the only thing holding me back in Linux is the vpn we are using at my company, not working natively on linux yet. This might fix that, thanks

what a hearty video for all beginners!

If I pass through a partition instead of an entire disk will I still experiment performance improvements?

I haven't bothered with Windows at home in so long that I never thought about these settings. This is some really good info and could be a good option for those who are making the switch to Linux but can't completely let go of Windows yet.

Great video. I absolutely love your content. Btw if you don't mind can you explain the rational behind spice vs virtio display.

amazing guide, thank you so much for it. all other guides are too confusing

Awesome Video

Nice video, I learnt a lot. Waiting the video for do it with Mac please! Cheers from Ecuador.

This could be much better! Use a LVM pool, add a VirtIO SCSI controller and attach the storage to that. That way you don't need dedicated hardware but you get pretty much bare metal hardware. Also, EFI secboot is a piece of cake using libvirt! :)

What i personally like to do when i need to use windows vm is i just run it in headless mode and RDP into it with remmina, and its pretty seamless, also you can enable the multimonitor mode in remmina so it feels just like native experience.

Thank you, Chris. Like keeping a skunk under your porch. Seriously though, good information.

When you did the comparison I think you should have left RAM & CPU exactly the same during both tests so that you were comparing the differences only between qcow2 & raw disk. In addition, the qcow2 file test should have been done on the exact same hard drive as the raw test.

Oh my god thank you, I've been scouring the internet for literal years looking for the right way to set up VMs, always leading to dead ends and me going "well I don't really need windows that badly anyways" while hyperventilating copium xD Big, BIG thank you 👍

Wow, great info! I always thought that one day our computers would be powerful enough to run Windows gaming through Linux. I didn't think we were there yet. Your video gives me hope that I will never need Windows for gaming again some day.

yes, it encouraged me to stop fighting with trying to get windows programs to work in xubuntu. I'll bite the bullet and set up windows on linux. Thanks a lot!

so helpfoul

Excellent tutorial / walkthrough Chris, thank you! I am currently using Oracle VirtualBox for my Windows 10 and it works pretty good. Are there advantages to using QEMU for virtualization in Linux? I am currently using Fedora 36 as my host.

This is a great guide, thank you! How do you recommend sharing a directory between the host and guest? None of the options I've found have been great (samba, experimental virtio-win drivers, NFS, just use VirtualBox)...

Lol your first changes to the W10 machine are exactly the same things I always do to a freshly installed W10 machine. Also the debloat is the next step I always do ;)

Very good video bro , if u can post gpu passthrough process that would be so helpful for those who prefer windows gaming. Thank you.

You could/should have made the storage in the 1st example virtio based, which performs way better than the generic SATA controller. You just have to load the driver during the install. If you're going to pass physical disks though, I think its considered better practice to use '/dev/disk/by-id' because /dev/sd* can sometimes shift around.

I was watching Son of a Tech for crypto and your video was recommended afterwards. I did not know I needed you in my life. I have been binge watching your videos--so informative. I love you.

nice, i didnt know about that virtio config and connector just in time but im gonna do on windows 11 with emulated tpm and sec boot

WoW! Linux, Windows, Mac together would be amazing.

thanks a lot , i just watched the video , and ill let you know how it went

I enjoyed your video, though exactly how relevant it is for a machine that's already 14 years old is anyone's guess. Your point about hosting an OS directly on the hard drive is definitely a good one, it's what I did to access my current Windows Vista and XP partitions from within the WinXP vm (yes, I did get it activated). In addition, virtio drivers for WinXP are a little harder to get, as the current virtio drivers only support as far back as windows 8. Additionally, I don't have 30GB of space to spare for the WDKs that building from source seems to require. Again, thanks for the video, you have plenty of good tips when using modern machines for virtual hosts.

Thank you Chris, that was very informative, as always. Do you by chance have an idea on how to establish an internet connection inside a qemu vritual machine for a host that has only a wireless card, like most laptops?

I love watching you do these amazing installs but it goes right over my head, I'm the peasant that uses windows mail, I don't know any better.

Thanks for the video Chris! Really helpful for me since I only need Windows for one specific program where I have to test it at work. Could you also post some commands to do the same thing on Fedora? I tried but some things ended up missing, if that's not too much different.

Hi Chris. Thanks for the detailed explanation. That is really helpful! I just got a question on the harddrive. Can I also use my primary M2 SSD and use a partition of that drive? Or do I really need an entire physical drive? Thanks!

Thanks

OK Chris, trying to work through this. I think I got the QEMU part done (the copy the commands links are very helpful). The directions on your "Setting Up Windows Inside Linux" kind of broke down at the "Optimizing Windows VM" part. Directions are kind of sketchy there. What am I supposed to do? The GitHub page is quite confusing.

Looking at this and 15 min being a long install time reminds me of my first computer that my dad got for me from some garage sale for $50 in 2006. That thing had Win XP installed on it but it was from like 1996 so XP ran about as fast as a slug. I took me like 4 hours to install XP on it. Had absolutely no idea what I was doing

Hiii great video as usual!!!!, do you think that use a volume or partition of the disk for all the VM's is going to have the same final result as you did with direct disk? Thanks in advance for all

You sir, are amazing! Thank you so much for this tutorial. One question, what hardware are you running? Thanks

Nice video. Now I'm expecting the Graphics Card pass through

Yes please do the GPU passthrough. I live in Linux and use Virtualised Windows. However the problem is running Ableton Live 11, it lags a bit. I found that VMware didn't suffer the same as KVM.

Chris, Irecently found your channel. As a PC Technician troubleshooting Windows professionally for 11 years and heavily steep in hardware configurations, I say, it's a rarity to find a youtuber that knows, in detail, what he or she is talking about. Anyway, my interest here is possibly leveraging your intimate knowledge to determine the minimal Linux support needed to run qemu, with and without virt-manager. If the challenge sounds fun to you, would you do a video on that setup" perhaps on Arch?

Yaaa 🎉!!! I just updated my Omen 17 laptop and can set up a virtual windows to run Scrivener!!! I had Windows 10 when I first opened it, so now I will have to run Powershell to get my product key from the Bios. I am sure it’s hiding there.

Yes, please! An episode on how to debloat win 10 trash! God bless you!

Great video, would be great if you can show us how to set up GPU pass-through.

recently for fun i set up W7pro as a VM on my Windows 10 box, (5800 Ryzen) i chose an NVME as storage. it was setup real fast AND running nearly bare metal speed.

Well I got surprising performance out of my toy Windows Server install by doing the dedicated harddrive trick. Granted, I didn't give it a physical device, I gave it a zvol or ZFS Volume. Basically I let Windows think it was a harddrive, but it was managed by the host' ZFS system.

One video showing how optimize for games would be great!! Since i switched to Linux about 3 years ago i rarely play Killer Instinct (game i like a lot but i don't play anymore because i need to dual boot everytime i want to play) and this games is a Microsoft Store one. hehe. Thanks for all the content you make by the way!

4:50 - @chris Titus tech Question: in Proxmox I have a host with 6 cores, and I'm able to allocate 6 cores to (currently) 3 VMs without issues... Is this a difference in how the software is allocating that hardware vs the software you're using here? Thanks for the vid!

This is awesome Titus! How much horse power does the host machine have?

that's super great! thx for that! Just a question, what if I don't have a spare drive, would separate partition work?

thanks!!