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Programming

Setting up Fedora with a Windows VM

This is a short guide on how to setup Fedora with a Windows VM via libvirt, optionally sharing a RAID-1 Btrfs volume from the host to the Windows guest via SAMBA. I'm assuming you are coming from Windows.

Reasons why you might want to do this:

  • Windows is quite annoying.
  • With Looking Glass, you can passthrough your GPU to the Windows guest and enjoy native graphics performance.
  • The Btrfs filesystem allows snapshotting, checksumming and multi-disk RAID with an unequal number/size of drives.
  • You can snapshot the entire Windows VM and revert to it anytime.

GPU Power Crashes

For a few months, while running my Windows 11 VM with a GPU passthrough-ed, I was getting random reboots/screen hangs. There was a clear pattern - the reboots/hangs occured whenever I launched a resource-intensive application on the VM, such as a game.

In an effort to trace down the problem, I looked through dmesg (truncated for brevity) for various boots: