FAST VIRTUAL MACHINES

Jonni Bidwell transcends meat space, ventures virtuously into the valleys of the virtual and returns laden with actual knowledge.

- Jonni Bidwell

Virtualisation… where would we be without it? We don’t actually know, but life would certainly be harder. Thanks to virtual machines (VMs), home users can effortlessly boot all manner of other operating systems. Those might be exotic flavours of Linux or (since you surely don’t really need an actual install of this monstrosity anymore) a Windows VM for those odd times where it’s handy. This can be taken to extremes, too. Thanks to PCIe passthrough, which we covered back in LXF273, you can sacrifice a whole GPU to your VM, enabling it to run games (or CUDA simulations) arbitrarily close to native speed.

This time around we’ll look at a different but equally impressive technology in the form of Intel GVT-g. This makes it possible for us to segment newer Intel GPUs into virtual ones that can be seamlessly connected to our VMs. Unlike the passthrough method, this still enables us to use the GPU on the host.

Businesses, too, have a lot of love for the virtuals. VMs are highly portable and much easier to re-instantiate than regular machines in the event that the host running them catches fire. There’s also an efficiency improvement, in that a single machine can take on the role of several servers, and still enjoy the benefits of having those workloads properly segregated. Containers, of course, achieve this with even more efficiency, but at the cost of losing some of that segregation.

There are all kinds of tools for managing virtual machines at scale, so we’ll have a brief look at one of those, too. Specifically, we’ll show you that Vagrant makes it trivially easy to install Arch Linux.