Computer OS setup and trade offs

[blueskull]

Hi all. First of all, I know this may start a Windows vs Linux war, and to certain degree, I need a WvL for my use case. I don't want to do this, but after a long battle with VM troubles, I'm left with no options but to ask the knowledgeable people here.

Since day one I got my current workstation, I had troubles with its OS. Most of my daily jobs call for Linux, and the only rest one (PCB design in Altium) calls for Windows.

By instinct, I tried to install Linux on it and Windows as VM. Well, if it had worked, I wouldn't be posting here. At that time (early 2016), AMD driver was undergoing a huge strategical shift, and did't work well with any knows VM hypervisors. VBox gave me unusable bad performance, VMWare refused to even turn 3D on. Rule number one, if Altium doesn't work, it's not gonna cut it.

Then I tried Windows 7, with tons of bugs on my mobo device drivers, so I then moved to Windows 10, which is the one I'm using now, but the good days is about to end.

Starting from a few days ago, VBox started to fail attaching USB devices, and my GPU was acting up in Windows. For whatever reason, ESP32 toolchain for Windows didn't work despite I tried to pacman all packages. ESP32 toolchain in Linux works, but had a hard time having access to USB devices. Similarly, dd gave me buffer sync issues when I flash Linux image to an USB drive for my Yocto workflow.

Also, as I'm moving from OpenSCAD and TinkerCAD to FreeCAD, I have this rendering defects on Windows, and I guess Linux will be better since FreeCAD was originally written for Linux. I also use LibreOffice Draw quite a lot, and it doesn't perform well on Windows. These are also reasons for me to move to Linux.

----------TLDR----------

I'm starting to think how about to move back to Linux and run Windows in a VM? So, here are a few questions on this topic:

1. How does recent AMD GPU Pro driver work with hypervisors? Looking at free VBox or VMWare Workstation. Specifically for Altium Designer 17.
2. How does recent AMD GPU Pro driver work with Ubuntu 16.04? Is there any severe video bugs?
3. How does recent AMD GPU Pro driver work with Valve Source engine? Many games I tested before using AMD GPU first release had performance issue (extremely slow) with Source engine. A 750Ti beat the crap out of my R9 nano. It doesn't make sense at all.

I would like to ask the people here with experience on AMD/Linux/VM to give me some insights.

Before anyone suggests a dual boot or a separate Windows box, I actually considered both. These are last options.

A dual boot won't work since FAT32 doesn't work well with large capacity SSDs, and mounting NTFS in Linux usually doesn't end up well based on my past experience. This effectively isolates Windows and Linux though they are on the same SSD. I hate dual boot also because if Windows is compromised by a virus, it can also mess with the Linux partition, even if it can't decode its contents. Also, grub seems to have a bad reputation for screwing up NTLDR, or rarely, the other way around.

As for a separate computer, not only SSD is isolated, but also I have to switch input source on my multiple monitors, which I hate to do, especially considering I have 3 monitors and all my USB devices are attached via these monitors, and there's no way to switch USB upstream on my monitors. A 3*SPDT KVM with USB3.0 and 1600p60 DisplayPort will be bloody expensive, besides hot plugging monitors sometimes will screw up color calibration, which is a bug of Spyder 5 Express software. Screen capturing from Windows box to Linux workstation is an option, but an expensive one. Most of them don't like AsMedia USB3.1 converters, and I want a dual screen setup, which my computer's Intel USB3.0 controller can't provide the bandwidth for (uncompressed dual 1080p60=6Gbps).

I've been thinking along the line of PCIe passthrough, but my ITX mobo doesn't allow a second GPU, so that's not an option. M2 to GPU is also not the best option as my M2 slot is used by SSD, besides that still has the monitor KVM issues. I know there's gnif's shared memory option, that would be nice, only if I can get a second GPU to hook up to my computer. I will try this if software 3D VM doesn't work, even if that means to say goodbye to NVMe SSD.

Linux in a separate box is not an option as I do need the raw power of my workstation for Yocto and some other applications (simulation, etc.).

Any suggestions are welcomed and appreciated. Thanks.

[fourtytwo42]

In a nutshell you have just described exactly why I have stuck with XP for so many years but that is also coming to an end as tool support is waning (some latest versions now don't support it) as you describe all later versions of windows suck and some tools either are not available for Linux or licence costs are much higher. The connundrum of an engineer. The only simple solution appears to be multiple machines Grrrr

P.S. You can turn off auto updates to improve stability but then you don't get the fixes to the cockups introduced in the last update 

[German_EE]

I was forced to upgrade both MS Windows AND the hardware after I found that an application required it. My new setup is a Fujitsu PC with lots of RAM and an EFI BIOS but I also run dual SSDs, one for MS Windows 10 and one for Linux Mint. Linux is my GOTO for most daily work but I run Windows 10 to interface with the test gear with the network card disabled (no drivers).

No problems so far, selecting the boot disk through the EFI BIOS is all I need.

[rdl]

I moved all my data to a FreeNAS machine. I put an Icy Dock in one of the front 3.5" bays and in it, each OS is on a separate SSD. I even have a separate disk just to quarantine Steam.

Yes, rebooting is a pain when switching, but SSDs boot pretty fast.

[David Hess]

That would be cool, but how do you share data between them? I have a huge SSD that I don't want to waste its space.

I might either make a small FAT32 partition that both systems can access or use the NAS for the same purpose.  The FAT32 partition could go on its own small drive if necessary.

[rsjsouza]

blueskull, if you want to keep Linux as a guest OS, have you ever tried VMware? In my experience it works much better than Virtualbox with JTAG-debugging things attached to it - well, as long as they are not FTDI-based (which becomes painfully slow).
I haven't used it for 3D CAD/CAE software, though, although in this case the Windows would be the host OS.

[German_EE]

Yes, there is some expense the way I did it, but the reward is simplicity of use and the knowledge that nothing MS Windows Update does can touch the Linux drive as it can't read it. Linux can however read NTFS partitions and there is a small NTFS partition on the MS Windows drive used to swap data between the two ecosystems.

[julianhigginson]

Sounds like a bit of a nightmare.. though also sounds like you're having problems with the fundamental windows/driver setup, before you even put Linux on a VM into the picture? I think you're going to have similar issues in that case with windows in a VM on there...

What USB devices do you need to pass through to Linux VMs? If it's just a debug probe, and you are using gdb, you could consider a little bench RPI to host the debug probe, then link to that over the network from your computer (have been doing that recently with a segger jlink from windows, mostly so I can leave stuff probed when I shut down my computer and take it out of the office.. and maybe even monitor remotely in future... But I'm sure you could also do that from Linux in a VM if the VM wasn't able to get a direct USB connection working...)