this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
64 points (94.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40782 readers
1648 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Am I missing something here? Why use a VM for gaming?

I'll take Linux with proton any day over all that faffing with windows and a GPU pass through.

[–] kn100 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You are - this is a server - it hosts approximately 20 LXC containers beside a couple of VMs. One of the VMs hosts Windows - and gets a GPU and a couple of USB ports. Another VM hosts Linux, which in turn runs Home Assistant, and gets a USB port so that it can use my Zigbee dongle, etc.

I could feasibly use a Linux VM instead, but I'd have to do the same VM passthrough chicanery - and the way I have this set up right now means that I do not treat the gaming workload as anything special, it's just another VM. I can snapshot it, move it between storage devices, share hardware between it and other VMs, and so on.

Oh also, the second GPU that my machine has (an intel iGPU) doesn't go to waste either! That gets passed through to yet another VM, which hosts Jellyfin - and it makes use of the iGPU component of the CPU to do video transcoding. Virtualising workloads like this is far nicer to manage than for example just having a linux box with all these services running on it. What if the game crashes? In the VM world, I just restart the VM. What if one of the other services shits the bed and starts writing logs frantically (as has happened to be recently). It's filled the disk, and suddenly I can't game! In the VM world, the service gets its own portion of disk space and therefore can't eat it all up. You could feasibly solve all these problems with the setup you describe, but why, when virtualisation has such a small penalty performance wise and comes with a bunch of other benefits for free?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I usually shy away from VMs because I have to dedicate a fixed amount of resources, e.g. ram.

I tend to rely on docker or bare metal services on a server. But I don't use a server for gaming.