I remember saying to myself, "every single meeting room and common area in this building is designed around the consumption of alcohol--the long bar downstairs, the meeting room modeled after an airport lounge, the meeting room modeled after a smoking club, the meeting room / roof deck...

A year or two later they had that public "me-too" snafu (years before me-too) that led to a founder's resignation, a whole bunch of other people leaving, and then Microsoft acquiring the company. I wondered back then, is this the end of the company?

Perhaps so, but perhaps not... Here we are, 8 years the acquisition, only now lamenting a slow demise. That's a nice run for a startup acquired by a behemoth enterprise software company. With the exception of Redhat (which is debatable,) IBM had no ability to keep a software acquisition's culture, verve, or ability alive past a year or two.

Can anyone with experience with either the AirPods Max 1s or XM-6s tell me what they feel like to sleep with on an airplane (business class with a lie flat bed?) Plane travel is my primary use-case for these type of headphones.

vm-curator is a rust TUI that works directly with QEMU/KVM, skipping libvirt. It is designed for desktop use-cases. (For servers, Proxmox is a better choice.) QEMU runs in user (non-root) mode only.

The app's biggest feature is guided support for single and multi-gpu passthrough. For computers with only one GPU, vm-curator will write and manage scripts to detach your GPU from your Linux display manager, attach it to your VM, and then will monitor your VM's use so that upon shutdown, it will reverse the attachment and restore your Linux display. For computers with multiple GPUs, vm-curator provides easy configuration of GPU-passthrough with support for looking glass. vm-curator also supports virgl para-virtualized 3D acceleration, which works great in Linux guests (but for full GPU performance, pass-through is a must.)

vm-curator also supports SLIRP, passt, and bridged mode for networking back-ends, comprehensive USB and PCI detection and pass-through, VM state monitoring, QCOWS2 snapshot management, and host directory passthrough. For BTRFS users, vm-curator will also automatically turn off BTRFS copy-on-write for your VM directory to avoid the double copy-on-write performance penalty. VM installation is easy with over 120 OS profiles built-in.

I've long wanted to leverage QEMU/KVM for desktop virtualization, but have been long stymied by gnome boxes (lacks advanced features) and virt-manager (very difficult to setup, especially with NVIDIA GPUs.) vm-curator has solved these hurdles for me. Hopefully it can help you as well.

FOSS engagement (PRs/contributions + feedback) is most welcome!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993651

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Exploring popular options and finding what works for you is easier than it has ever been, and fun too. The difference between Linux today and the Linux of old is that for most setups, all the pieces you choose can fit together nicely and "just work." Despite all the different flavors and variations and distributions and desktop environments and window managers and the like, pretty much every popular distro uses a recent or near recent version of the monolithic Linux kernel + system-d, so all the important stuff is more or less the same (with tweaks here or there.)

single-gpu-passthrough relies on a script (run outside the app) to disconnect the GPU from the current X.org or Wayland session and then to attach it to the running VM. When the VM is shut down, the script runs this process in reverse. This means you can only run one VM at a time with your main display and peripherals, and while you're running that VM, you can't access your host with your display and peripherals (you can always SSH into it while the VM is running.)

This is the common process for getting single-GPU-passthrough to work. vm-curator helps prepare the system and generates the scripts automatically.

multi-gpu-passthrough is designed to run with looking-glass, but it can also support physical KVM switching if the user prefers.

In the "i can only sort of use one OS at a time" sense, it is like dual booting, but the transition is much faster (since there is no reboot required) and, as mentioned, your host doesn't really go away (you can still SSH into it from another PC on your network.)

Testers and feedback are wanted very much: I only have one hardware configuration I can test on, and I'd be grateful for anyone to try it and report their experience--especially for multi-gpu pass-through (as I can only test single at this time.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790165

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

- Defaulting to SGL display-mode when enabling 3D accel for Linux VMs for better graphics performance. - Changing display mode for existing VMs is now available in Manage - Adding multiple VMs for the same OS is now supported - Custom VM naming now persists. - Renaming VMs is now supported.

Next major feature: Full PCI passthrough support, including GPU passthrough via looking-glass.