The Mac Pro Lives

Re:The Mac Pro Lives by Keyframe on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @03:49PM (#14036522)

Thanks! This sounds almost exactly like something I need. Why separate keyboard and mouse though? Only difference that I would prefer is to retain the same keyboard/mouse/tablet and monitors (three of them) and to be able to easily switch between the two, preferably to have copy and paste working between the two. Alternative, I'm pursuing right now, is a KVM with synergy, but I have limited deskside space (for machines) - I'd rather have one machine with 20 cores and four graphics cards than two machines.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Mac Pro Lives by mwill on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:49PM (#14039004)

To get the performance benefits the VM can't be run with a spice / vnc interface, so there is no virtual screen or virtual input. You have to pass the VM its GPU and some USB ports and can only see/interact through those and the network bridge.

My keyboard and mouse can pair to multiple different machines at the same time and switch with a button press so I just do that.

Synergy also works fine, you just need to temporarily pass a real keyboard in to set it up.

There is also a newish feature in QEMU that allows they physical devices to be swapped back and forward by pressing both CTRL keys [1]. It works reasonably well with a few quirks (Extra mouse buttons dont work in guest, for example)

Same thing apples to the screen, I surrender an entire monitor to whatever VM is running, but you could use a KVM switch.

It's a little work to get set up and tuned but it is 100% a dual boot killer. The next time I reconfigure this machine, I won't be installing a native Windows partition, I simply don't need it anymore.

Heres a video demoing and explaining it a bit: https://youtu.be/16dbAUrtMX4

[1] https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2016/04/linux-evdev-input-suppor...

[ Parent | on HN ]