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I am seeking advice on how to best manage my workstation. My current goal is to learn about cybersecurity forensics and incident response. I have learned that open vswitch supports port mirroring but only works on kvm-based virtualization.

At the same time I have 2 decent gpus that I want to do some gaming from time to time and also watch some movies, if I'm not mistaken, linux has poor support for 4k video acceleration.

My initial plan was to install proxmox and do gpu pass-through but so far I've been unsuccessful. The nvidia code 43 is my nemesis.

I would appreciate if you guys could take the time to help me..

Regards, Alex

Alexandru Hera
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  • `mpv` can use `--hwdec=auto` to accelerate video decode of formats the Linux drivers support. (For Intel GPUs that's most HW-supported formats. For NVidia's closed source drivers I'd assume that's all the formats the HW supports). – Peter Cordes Apr 25 '20 at 22:46
  • Thank you, Peter! How about gaming or gpu pass-through? any thoughts on that? I have a Nvidia GTX 1070 and a AMD R9 380. – Alexandru Hera Apr 26 '20 at 00:28
  • I don't virtualize my desktop, I just run stuff under Linux on Intel drivers. (Or on a previous desktop with a discrete GPU, the AMD or NVidia drivers.) Hardware performance counters like `perf stat` mostly don't work through virtualization so it wouldn't be usable for me even if I wanted to bother setting that up and maintaining multiple VMs. (TL:DR: I don't have an answer for your whole question, just the video decode on Linux part.) – Peter Cordes Apr 26 '20 at 00:35
  • Alright. Thanks, Peter! :) – Alexandru Hera Apr 26 '20 at 00:57

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You are mistaken in thinking that Linux is in any way deficient when it come to handling 4K resolutions. As somebody running 5K and 8K monitors on my Linux systems, I can assure you it works perfectly well. Especially if you are using Nvidia GPUs, as you seem to be.

To defeat the code 43 error in your Windows VM, you need to hide the fact that the virtual machine is virtual from the Nvidia driver. Nvidia do this asinine thing in their driver where it refuses to initialize a GeForce GPU if it detects a VM (but it initializes a Quadro or a Tesla just fine). I seem to recall that on proxmox you need to set the cpu: host,hidden=1 or something similar.

Gordan Bobić
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