Hi guys, basically as the title says I want to make external SSD drive with “Windows to Go” for the stuff that I really need Windows for unfortunately (proprietary CAD software) but there is no software for making this on Linux that I can find
Edit: typo
Why not just run Windows in a VM?
Unfortunately not everything works in a VM
It should.
Hell I have hardware dongles I have to deal with that work fine in a VM.
Are you sure you can’t go the easier route with a VM? Running off USB will be slow and unpleasant, especially with windows.
What’s the VM issue?
In my case it’s been hardware acceleration. Sure I can make the adobe suite “run” but it’s not really usable at a professional level without hardware accel.
Single GPU or dual GPU laptop?
Have you looked at libvf.io?
virtio-gpu (if you look to the more recent work) has made big strides, but I also wouldn’t consider it “ready”.
Single gpu on my desktop. AMD 7900xt. I haven’t looked at either of those. I’ll give them a browse!
Take a look, and consider one more option (I have this setup in one of my workstations).
A second GPU. Older is fine, I have an older quadro 2000 in one machine thats great for cad, when I load up my VM for AutoCAD architecture, thats the GPU its using.
I have a few others with quadro 620s in them, the Intel iGPU is accessed shared by being an lxc, the quadros I pass through to the VMs. Some need very different configs, so I only power up the VM when I need it, so they can all use the same passed through GPU.
Ohh I see. You just dedicate another gpu to the VM? That sounds cool. I do have an extra.
Yup! Doesnt matter if its running in a reduced capacity by being in a x8 instead of an x16 either (which honestly won’t matter as much to performance as you might think anyway), just about any hardware acceleration makes a world of difference with those applications.
Have you ever tried running Solidworks or Fusion 360 or Ansys or other Autodesk software in a vm? Painful is all I can say
Yes.
On my virt host, which I pass the GPU to. I remote into it from my laptop.
I have a client running both Solidworks and Fusion 360 in VMWare Workstation with GPU pass-thru enabled, it’s pretty straightforward to setup and the end-users were pleased with it’s performance. If you have USB license keys those usually work as well, just setup the USB device pass-thru.