From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Mon Jun 29 07:25:22 2015 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C22B398F053 for ; Mon, 29 Jun 2015 07:25:22 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Received: from mx02.qsc.de (mx02.qsc.de [213.148.130.14]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 8874B18FC for ; Mon, 29 Jun 2015 07:25:21 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Received: from r56.edvax.de (port-92-195-85-234.dynamic.qsc.de [92.195.85.234]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by mx02.qsc.de (Postfix) with ESMTPS id DEC4927683; Mon, 29 Jun 2015 09:25:18 +0200 (CEST) Received: from r56.edvax.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by r56.edvax.de (8.14.5/8.14.5) with SMTP id t5T7PHGO002046; Mon, 29 Jun 2015 09:25:17 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2015 09:25:17 +0200 From: Polytropon To: Joshua Isom Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dual booting plus Hyper-V Message-Id: <20150629092517.afec2a3e.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <55905A0A.1070600@gmail.com> References: <55905A0A.1070600@gmail.com> Reply-To: Polytropon Organization: EDVAX X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.1.1 (GTK+ 2.24.5; i386-portbld-freebsd8.2) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2015 07:25:22 -0000 On Sun, 28 Jun 2015 15:33:14 -0500, Joshua Isom wrote: > After many years, I'm thinking of turning my beastie into a gaming box > plus home server. It's overpowered for my current use. I'm not sure > wine's up to the task for hassle free gaming. Well, wine is pretty much advanced nowadays. If wine is not sufficient, there's winex which is a special variation of wine intended for gaming use. I'm running several "Windows" games myself with wine, as well as Linux games on FreeBSD. No problems. :-) > I think the easiest thing > would be running Windows on it's own hard drive with FreeBSD running in > Hyper-V. That sounds like overhead... > I'd get a dedicated windows disk as well as the BSD disks. The idea with dedicated disks is very good. It will allow you to replace OS installations easily (at least with FreeBSD). But why not simply dual-boot from one of the disks? Either you select the boot disk in the BIOS menu (if available), or you install the FreeBSD boot manager on the boot disk and let it boot normally (FreeBSD) or to the "Windows" disk. This gives you the full advantage of using FreeBSD without the overhead and possible problems with a hypervisor. Furthermore, today's boot processes are _fast_, so switching from one to the other OS can be a thing of less than a minute. The only situation where this does not work is when you need to run both FreeBSD and "Windows" at the same time. Is that one of your requirements? > The system is all ZFS on GPT at the moment. Is this > practical or is are there other alternatives to consider? Native (OS-controlled) ZFS use or through a hypervisor? Hmmmm... As I mentioned, I would go with real dual-boot instead... -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...