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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Excellent video as always. Keep up the excellent work.

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

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..👍

Thank you Chris, very informative and useful video!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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.

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

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.

Excellent as usual !!

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.

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

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)...

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

Thank you so much for this informative stuff

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.

You a smart man Chris! Thank You

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

Thanks for the video!

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

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.

what a hearty video for all beginners!

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.

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

Thanks for the guide! Did you ever got Single GPU Passthrough working?

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!!!!

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

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!

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?

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.

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

GREAT VIDEO as usual Chris! Can you run Mac OS and its applications on Linux?

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! :)

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.

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.

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.

Realize it might be a bit of an older video by now but have a question! When you say "pass through" the HDD, it seems you've just dedicated an SSD to it (which is nice on a desktop). If you were to store the storage file on say an NVME (say on a laptop where an additional drive would be harder), do you think the performance would be crazy different?

Great work Thank you

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

Thanx for the great video. Explained a lot on how to install Windows on a Linux VM.. One issue I've had with using Windows VM and installing a Linux distro on it is not being able to see other drives on the same PC or printers. Is this the same for a VM on Linux with Windows installed??

Sweet. Thanks!

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.

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!

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!

hi chris! great video! i've been having some issues, how can i virtualize a nvme drive with win10 already installed? i keep getting bluescreens on boot with virt-manager and virtualbox, i'm following similar steps for pci passthrough...

Awesome Video

Hello Chris, your videos are very nice and educational.. How could I reproduce your Linux desktop setup? There is a guide somewhere?

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 👍

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

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.

qcow2 works fine with virtio drivers installed and virtio chosen as the bus type for storage. It's not really a fair comparison when you run a qcow2 with SATA on a mechanical drive and compare it to directly passing through an SSD. Also there's a bug in virt-manager that improperly assigns CPU cores. It's always a good idea to manually assign cores/threads. To really optimize, you could also allocate hugepages and pin the CPU. You might want to look in to looking-glass if you're building up a system with GPU passthrough. It's possible to use evdev or a KVM to switch IO/displays between machines, but looking glass removes that hassle.

Chris I have a question ... windows host virtualbox as vm and windows 10 guest the sound is very choppy what do you recommend to solve audio issues especially when using a DAW the audio performance is really crappy ... Thx

This was very helpful. One thing I'm still having an issue with though. The mouse is kinda laggy. Anything to be done about that?

Installing on qcow is also pretty fast, as long as you configure it in virt-manger as a VirtIO disk and load the VirtIO drivers during install , which is kinda a not straight forward process. The advantage of doing installation on a qcow is due to snapshot or backup capabilities or you can just move the Windows install to a different machine, without pulling an entire drive.

I'm planning to run some Linux distro and Win 11 on my Win 10, just to test. What virtual program do you recommend? I used VirtualBox and Vmware before. Is there something better? Thanks.

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.

I have a problem with software that requires opengl 3.3 to run. Do you know a way to make this work? Been searching for a solution the whole day, but can't find one

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

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

How many disk drives are you using? And how much storage capacity do you recommend having to make so many partitions? Thank you!

Chris, are you using AMD CPU too? If so can you drop the name of the motherboard you're using when you start the GPU pass through? I went through this before but since I my PCI lanes were shared for nvme and GPU I couldn't blacklist my nvidia card. I don't know if this is a shared problem for GPU pass through on AMD cards

Using RDP and remoting into the VM is also a lot faster because Windows has optimizations for running over network connections and offloads some of the rendering to the client, which benefits from the host's GPU capabilities. So things like moving windows around and opening menus is much snappier. QXL is great but on anything past Windows XP, it's a display-only driver so all the rendering is done in software and taxing on the CPU. RDP bypasses a good chunk of that, but there's just no way to get good video acceleration on Windows without some form of GPU passthrough (be it full passthrough, or GVT-g or SR-IOV). QXL with 3D acceleration for Linux VMs on the other hand is awesome, basically as smooth as running natively. Can even run games! (Although OpenGL only for now, Vulkan is still WIP).

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.

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

Hi Chris, what would be really interesting (and I couldn't find anywhere) how I add and setup a second screen in virtmanager properly. I have 2 displays - which is not very uncommon nowadays I think - and want to use them both for my guest OS.