[GTALUG] VM decisions for school laptop..

[Ivan Avery Frey]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018, 20:05 Michael Galea via talk, <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> My son is off to university for CS this fall, and will need a laptop.
> I'm looking at purchasing one for him, so he can run Windows and Linux.
> I'm figuring on going the VM route.
>
> He can use both OS's but is probably more familiar with Win, and his
> courses mandate a number of windows only tools. I'm heading in the
> direction of booting Win10 and using a VM running Debian.
>
> A bit of research indicates that the two most popular free VM contenders
> are VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V.  Can anyone recommend one over the
> other?  Are there better choices?
>
> As per laptop specs, I am figuring on getting something with a late
> model Intel i7, 32 GB RAM, and 1-2TB storage. I figure many laptops must
> meet this spec.  Is there anything else I should be looking for?
>

Some  Lenovos have a 2nd graphics card in addition to the one on the chip.
Some time ago, some body posted to the internet a video of a game being
played on a Windows guest on Linux. The machine in question had VT-d and a
second graphics card and a second monitor.

VT-d allowed the guest OS to have direct access to the 2nd graphics card.

Today I don't know what the performance would be with Meltdown/Spectre
mitigations in both the host OS and the guest OS.

>
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