How to build a workstation in 2016

This idea started from this thread on Hacker News where OP managed to run Windows in a VM with direct access to the GPU (see GPU Passthrough) thanks to a technology called IOMMU available on most modern hardware.

The inspiration comes also from this experiment by Linus at running 7 gaming VMs in a single machine.

I have been using Linux since almost 20 years now and I can’t imagine myself being as productive and free in any other OS. That being said, you know very well the big elephant in the room regarding Linux: 3d rending and Windows dependent software.

Since I always dreamed of achieving this work/home environment on my hardware, being able to allocate hardware resources as I need and clearly isolating my work, entertainment hacking environments, I decided to build a home made cloud level virtualization solution.

This article could be a good start for people who are seriously deciding to switch to Linux without any compromise in productivity and convenience.

A word of advice. We are going to work with bleeding edge technologies both in hardware and software side. In a year or so from now, there will probably be a one button push solution to handle all of this. I am expecting to deal unpredictable issues and you should approach this project in the same way.

So before starting anything, backup all you important data. If possible do the whole project on a new set of hardware keeping a spare laptop or PC for critical work.