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CircuitStudio on a VM

frog

My favourite desktop machine runs Linux so I'm attempting to use CircuitStudio in a VirtualBox VM running Windows 7 Pro.  The installation went OK and CircuitStudio appears to be generally working except that PCBs aren't rendered.  I've heard a plausible rumour that this is to do with the (presumably incomplete) DirectX support provided by Virtualbox, although I've enabled 2D and 3D acceleration, so I'd hope that the VM will have the same graphics capabilities as the host machine.

 

Any suggestions, or ideas as to what exactly is preventing PCB rendering from working?

 

Thanks,

Frog

  • 0

    Hi

    There isn't any documentation that I am aware of that states Circuit Studio will actually run on a VM.

    But it is a very good question and I am sure many other Linux supporters would be keen to know.

     

    I will ask Altium directly about this for you.

     

    Thanks

     

     

    Carl

  • 0

    Did you reinstall the guest features after enabling all that?

  • 0 in reply to michaelwylie

    Guest features are installed, I couldn't say for sure whether video acceleration was enabled before installation.  I'll try reinstalling and report back.

  • 0

    HI guys the official line from  Altium is:

     

    Not recommended due to potential DirectX issues which it looks like we are seeing here, we have had some folks do it successfully. However, we do not support this configuration if it misbehaves in a way we suspect is due to the VM. Graphic issues, in PCB, crashes, etc.

     

     

    Thanks

     

    Carl

  • 0 in reply to Former Member

    Thanks Carl,

    Despite it being a not-officially-supported configuration I'm keen to explore what can be done.  Do you happen to have any details of installations where this has worked (host OS, client OS, hypervisor, graphics hardware)?  If the hypervisor is doing its job properly then Circuit Studio should have no way to tell that it's not running on a physical machine.  As aforementioned, my installation appears to be entirely stable apart from the fact that the PCB view doesn't actually get rendered.

     

    Best regards,

    Frog

  • 0 in reply to Former Member

    Hi Frog,

     

    As I understand hypervisors will not provide the same native graphics acceleration unless a technology like DirectPath I/O is used. And that is not supported by all hypervisors, at least not by any type 2 hypervisor that I know of (not that I've checked recently..).

  • 0 in reply to shabaz

    Thanks Shabaz, that's very helpful.

    A very quick investigations suggests that you're right about type 2. (For the benefit of other readers, type 1 hypervisors such as ESXi run on the bare metal, whereas type 2 are applications that run under a host OS).

    I wouldn't rule out using ESXi and then running Linux and Windows side-by-side if that will achieve the goal.  Perhaps I'll give that a try if I can find a spare SSD.  However, it would be nice to get an authoritative list of graphics driver requirements for Circuit studio (I have a trial installation running successfully on a somewhat antiquated Wintendo with a graphics card that must be 10 years old).

  • 0 in reply to frog

    Except of course that if I hand over the graphics hardware to a VM then it won't be available to other VMs.  I suppose running a headless Linux VM and accessing it via RDP from a Windows VM would be technically possible but I expect that the hit on the desktop performance would probably be unacceptable. 

     

    The inescapable truth appears to be that if I need two workstations then I need two workstations.  Unless anyone knows different.

  • 0 in reply to Former Member

    My experience with CS in a VM is it working fine. Details as follows:

    Host: Win 10, Nvidia card

    VM: Win 7, 4gb RAM, Video Accel enabled

    VMware Workstation 11

  • 0 in reply to harvie256

    It's working!  For the benefit of other users, here's my configuration:

    Physical machine is an Asus B85M motherboard, G3240 CPU, 8GB RAM, running Ubuntu 16.04LTS 64-bit.

    I'm using the onboard graphics controller.

    Vmware workstation player 12.1.1

    VM is Windows 7 professional 64-bit with 3.5GB RAM allocated and 1GB graphics memory.

    3D acceleration is enabled in the VM configuration, and (here's the trick) I edited the .vmx file and added this line at the end:

    mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = "TRUE"

     

    I've encountered no problems so far.

    Thanks everyone for your contributions and in particular.