So, I began an experiment yesterday night around the same time, and I went through the motions of that experiment and now I am on the other side and I can definitively say it didn't work and I'm not going to do it again.
I've been absolutely loving proxmox. I start off by running my servers on it, but lately I've been using it for small side projects, such as a big job I'm doing with respect to the haiku operating system. Running lxc containers is pretty cool, and for alternative operating systems I like being able to run everything in a virtual machine that's relatively light.
My main laptop is a beast. It's about 8 years old at this point, but it's got a 2060 RTX gpu, and a decent cpu, 32 gigs of ram, and spots for three separate forms of storage, two nvme ssds and a 2.5 mm Sata hard drive. The problem is, it's fairly loud, and it's getting a little bit unstable without sufficient cooling.
So I had a neat idea, I wanted to try running Windows 11 in a VM, and then give access to that VM to my GPU. The specific model of laptop I have is about as good as you're getting gas in that regard, it doesn't have too many surprises.
As always getting proxmox up and running was relatively straightforward, and other than ththeact that I had just used my big computer as a server and so I didn't really have anything else to connect with besides ancient historical artifacts, I relatively painlessly got Windows 11 up and running in a VM.
Immediately I could tell there were a lot of problems with this. Without immediate GPU support, even trying to surf the web was a challenge. Modern web browsers use the GPU to accelerate rendering of web pages, and so the web worked, but it looks a little bit flaky. As well, I wasn't really able to get the resolutions I was hoping for. However, I was hoping that those problems would go away once I completed the GPU pass through.
I did start to notice that there were things that I was really going to miss if all my computing lived in a VM. I didn't get the impression for example that I can expect Miracast streaming to come back, and the nextcloud client was acting a little bit flaky and it never acts flaky.
The final straw was doing the GPU pass through. I found a set of instructions that worked reasonably well, but success meant failure. Once I had everything up and running, the VM immediately died, and never came back. It also seized up in such a way that you couldn't make configuration changes to undo any of the things that were going on. Finally, proxmox decided that this was the final straw and hard locked, not even a kernel panic, just the cursor would stop blinking and the system would no longer respond to pings or keyboard input.
It was my understanding that what I was trying to do was a long shot on laptop hardware anyway, but it was nonetheless interesting, and it's always interesting to try to drive to the edge of what is reasonably achievable. One thing that's definitely sad is I think we are coming to the end of an era with respect to computer hardware. Building a relatively mid-tier gaming PC looks like the absolute top of the line in the last few decades.
I've been absolutely loving proxmox. I start off by running my servers on it, but lately I've been using it for small side projects, such as a big job I'm doing with respect to the haiku operating system. Running lxc containers is pretty cool, and for alternative operating systems I like being able to run everything in a virtual machine that's relatively light.
My main laptop is a beast. It's about 8 years old at this point, but it's got a 2060 RTX gpu, and a decent cpu, 32 gigs of ram, and spots for three separate forms of storage, two nvme ssds and a 2.5 mm Sata hard drive. The problem is, it's fairly loud, and it's getting a little bit unstable without sufficient cooling.
So I had a neat idea, I wanted to try running Windows 11 in a VM, and then give access to that VM to my GPU. The specific model of laptop I have is about as good as you're getting gas in that regard, it doesn't have too many surprises.
As always getting proxmox up and running was relatively straightforward, and other than ththeact that I had just used my big computer as a server and so I didn't really have anything else to connect with besides ancient historical artifacts, I relatively painlessly got Windows 11 up and running in a VM.
Immediately I could tell there were a lot of problems with this. Without immediate GPU support, even trying to surf the web was a challenge. Modern web browsers use the GPU to accelerate rendering of web pages, and so the web worked, but it looks a little bit flaky. As well, I wasn't really able to get the resolutions I was hoping for. However, I was hoping that those problems would go away once I completed the GPU pass through.
I did start to notice that there were things that I was really going to miss if all my computing lived in a VM. I didn't get the impression for example that I can expect Miracast streaming to come back, and the nextcloud client was acting a little bit flaky and it never acts flaky.
The final straw was doing the GPU pass through. I found a set of instructions that worked reasonably well, but success meant failure. Once I had everything up and running, the VM immediately died, and never came back. It also seized up in such a way that you couldn't make configuration changes to undo any of the things that were going on. Finally, proxmox decided that this was the final straw and hard locked, not even a kernel panic, just the cursor would stop blinking and the system would no longer respond to pings or keyboard input.
It was my understanding that what I was trying to do was a long shot on laptop hardware anyway, but it was nonetheless interesting, and it's always interesting to try to drive to the edge of what is reasonably achievable. One thing that's definitely sad is I think we are coming to the end of an era with respect to computer hardware. Building a relatively mid-tier gaming PC looks like the absolute top of the line in the last few decades.
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