[GTALUG] VM Support in Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 03:09:32PM -0400, William Witteman wrote:
> Thank you for your help!
> 
> My CPU isn't relevant to this - I have determined that it predates
> these features.

Most Core 2 Duo and Quad support it.  It has to be very old to not
support it, or one of the models intel purposely disabled it (like a
few Q8xxx and Q9xxx models).

> The CMOS battery is definitely an easy fix, and I even have CR2032s
> kicking around - it's just never been important enough to fix.
> 
> I was looking for any warning or things I should watch out for getting
> a new system.  Thanks.

Oh.  Want new toys.  My last purchases were apparently so severely
overkill that now I haven't got to buy anything new in like 7 years.

For linux support (assuming that is what is important) with kvm pretty
much any current intel or amd cpu should do.  I can't think of any that
don't support that given windows is using hyperv features for a lot of
things now which requires those features.

AHCI and NVMe disk interfaces seem to be standardized well enough that
those tend to just work.

Network controllers can be a problem if it is too new to be supported
in the kernel yet, which sometimes happens.

Probably no reason to go less than 32GB these days, although I haven't
checked desktop ram prices in a while.  I guess 16GB is enough for a
lot of people too, although I haven't had that little in a long time.

Video should at least work in VGA mode, and usually better without too
much trouble.

-- 
Len Sorensen