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It's been a while since we ran a story about some facet of people's home computer systems and I got to wondering what kind of monitor setup other Soylentils have at home. (If you have multiple systems, feel free to enumerate each setup.)
For example, I run Win 7 Pro on a Dell laptop which has a Mobile Intel Core 2 P8700 Duo processor and which sports NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M graphics. Instead of using the built-in laptop display, I have a several-year-old Gateway monitor with 1920x1200 resolution @ 59Hz and 32-bit color. I do not do any gaming, so I don't need the latest graphic card/monitor.
Some time down the road, though, I'd like to get a new computer and am thinking about a multi-monitor setup. I'd like at least 1920x1200 across 3 screens, though I'd not mind it if I could afford 3 x 4K screens. I'd like it to be compatible with some flavor of Linux or *BSD, preferably without systemd. Does anyone here have experience with that kind of setup? What OS do you use? What graphics card? What monitors and resolutions do you run?
I know there are some gamers on the site, as well. Here's a chance to brag a bit about your rig!
And, of course, please share any horror stories and/or triumphs, too!
(Score: 1) by dark_requiem on Tuesday August 23 2016, @12:08AM
OK, so I just finished building what I consider the ultimate gaming rig, and I will take the opportunity to brag.
First, in answer to the primary question, the new monitor has just been hooked up, and it's an Acer Predator X34, 34" 1440p ultrawide 100Hz Gsync. It is beautiful, and it is fast.
But, more interesting than the monitor is what it's connected to. The hardware itself is standard over-the-top gaming rig style: Gigabyte G1 Gaming Z170X Gaming G1 motherboard (dual full x16 PCIe slots and built-in water block!). An intel i7 6600k, 64 GB DDR4 3000 (15-15-15-35 timings), 2 x MSI GTX 1080 Sea Hawk EK (oc'd 1080s with EKWB blocks factory installed, no warranty voiding for my watercooling!), and a pair of Samsung 950 pro 512GB SSDs. There are two custom water cooling loops, one cools the cpu/memory/motherboard, and one cools the two GPUs, and even heavily overclocked, it runs icy cold.
But, more interesting still is the software setup. For a gaming machine, it's far from standard. First of all, the OS that boots on the machine is Debian Stretch with KDE. It is fast, it is stable, and we're at the point where most of the bugs I dealt with have been worked out, and most of the plasma desktop features have been added in. It does, unfortunately, run systemd, which is something I could do without, but for purposes of this machine, I'm willing to deal (I upgraded from Debian Jessie mostly due to plasma 5's superior dpi scaling adjustments, systemd was largely incidental to that).
Now, first thing any gamer will see wrong with this is, I'm running Linux. I'm a big advocate of Linux gaming, and for any given game, given the option, I will run it under Linux. But we also all know the AAA titles mostly never hit linux (yet. Work your astounding magic, Vulkan!), and if you want to be gaming with the latest and greatest, you're stuck running Windows. But I'll be damned if I'm going to boot to it directly, if I don't have to. And, luckily, I don't. My Windows install runs in a VM, via qemu/kvm/libvirtd. The host Debian OS gets only the integrated Intel GPU, and the 1080s are bound to the vfio driver for passthrough. I also pass through one of the two (or three, if you use the sata express usb 3.1 bay that comes with this mobo) USB controllers on the motherboard (luckily, one of them is in its own iommu group, so can be passed through by itself), as well as passing through the onboard creative sound card (not ideal, the linux host doesn't seem to like unbinding it cleanly, so while it works in the guest, it doesn't rebind to the host properly, but this isn't a big issue for me). The VM's disk drive is an LVM volume (my entire system is on a RAID0 based on the two Samsungs, with a LUKS volume on top of that, and an LVM VG on top of that, so thanks to latest grub2, everything, even the boot partition, is encrypted, and it all unlocks with one password.). So, I created to LVs, one for installing a VM of debian stretch, one for installing Win10 (the debian LV is for linux gaming, so I don't have to mess with binding/unbinding the GPUs to the host OS, and can just pass through to whichever VM I'm going to use for the game I'm going to play. Unfortunately, both cards are in the same iommu group, so I'm limited to passing them both through to an OS, I can't, for instance, run separate VMs, each with one card running different games).
I get what is, so far as I can tell, full native performance. The monitor was the last piece of the puzzle (it has, among its other features, both HDMI and DP, so I can now use the input button on the monitor to switch between host on hdmi, and guest on DP, since I want the guests to have gsync support, but don't care about gsync on the host). I have a single set of kb/mouse connected (along with a thrustmaster warthog hotas/rudder pedals), which I connect to an IOGear USB3 switch, which connects the whole setup to two USB ports on the computer (one on each USB controller, so one is on the host, one passed through to the guest), so I can switch I/O between host and guest with two button presses.
The sole and singular problem with this setup, at present, is that with recent nvidia driver versions, I'm unable to run in SLI, so I'm wasting an entire 1080 on physx processing. There is a program called DifferentSLI, which I believe would solve my sli problem (by patching the nvidia driver to always report that sli is certified), but it hasn't been updated for recent driver versions. I've looked at the code, and it's searching for a specific hex string to identify the patch location, but I haven't had the time to pour over nvidia drivers with a hex editor to see what's needed to get it working with current driver versions). But, other than SLI, the whole setup works perfectly. I'm currently working on building a set of iptables rules that allow the Windows VM to install updates, run games, and have exactly no other internet access, so windows won't be able to report home. Basically, I'm taming the beast and keeping it in a cage.
So, what I have created is a completely virtualized Windows gaming environment, carefully isolated within a Linux host, which allows me to run any and every game on the market at ultra settings in 1440p, while still conveniently avoiding ever actually booting Windows on the bare metal (other than firmware updates, which, unfortunately, gigabyte only releases as Windows programs, but I have a separate old HDD with a windows install I can boot to run firmware updates, as necessary). And, I gain many of the advantages Linux brings to the table, like regular LVM snapshots should I need to experiment with, and possibly break, Windows, or to roll back to when MS breaks my install, or a virus slips past ESET. Once I have SLI, the setup will be complete. And, all the while, I can also support and hopefully encourage Linux gaming by playing those games which are actually ported on native linux. All without ever having to reboot the machine!