| Title | You Can Now Run Windows 11 Virtual Machines in GPU Memory | |
| Date | Monday May 08, @02:25AM | |
| Author | hubie | |
| Topic | ||
| from the why?-because-you-can,-I-suppose dept. | ||
Run your whole system from your GPU:
WTF?! Now you can bypass your hard drive and store your whole operating system in your VRAM (should you want to). Well-known Windows modder NTDEV has demonstrated how, and it's surprisingly painless.
Step one is to create a RAM drive in your GPU's memory. A VRAM drive, if you will. There's an open-source tool that can do it for you called GpuRamDrive. It only takes a couple clicks but the tool was abandoned before it reached stability, so you might need to try it a few times.
Step two is to use your pick of tools to create a virtual machine. NTDEV used Windows' baked-in Hyper-V manager, which is a simple yet powerful tool for spawning virtual machines available to Windows 10 and 11 Pro, Education, and Enterprise users. You'll need to change just a couple of defaults in Hyper-V, and you can pick those out in NTDEV's video.
If you have an RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX or a GPU with more than 20 GB of VRAM then you should be able to squeeze a vanilla Windows 11 installation onto the VRAM drive you created. If you didn't drop a grand on a new GPU this past year, you'll have to use an alternate operating system with less demanding storage requirements. NTDEV uses Tiny11, a stripped-down version of Windows 11 that he created.
[...] I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to run Windows 11 on their VRAM. And yet, it's astonishingly practical: quick to set up and seemingly as fast and stable as a regular virtual machine. Why not, then, I suppose?
A YouTube video showing it running
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, You Can Now Run Windows 11 Virtual Machines in GPU Memory on 2023-05-23 21:57:49