I have a single 500 GB NVMe drive. I'm using GPT and I have the following partitions:
- 1G of
ef00 / EFI System
for/boot
- 4G of
8200 / Linux swap
- 245G of
8300 / Linux filesystem
for a Linux install, my host/primary OS
The rest of the drive, 250G, is free space. I'd like to use it for my Windows 10 VM, virtualized with KVM, while avoiding as much overhead as possible. I've seen three approaches to this:
- Have a single large partition, and put a
raw
image on it. - Have a second
8300
partition, and pass it as a disk to KVM. - Software RAID trickery (the complexity is off-putting).
However, I was wondering, is there any way to let the Windows 10 installer take care of the free space partitioning for me, by giving it access to a certain range of sectors, and pretending that it's an actual standalone physical drive?
Alternatively, wouldn't it be possible for me to just pre-allocate all necessary partitions for Windows (namely a system partition, an MSR, a Windows partition, and a recovery tools partition, as described here), and somehow pass them to KVM?
And my theories aside, what's the best performance-first solution? I've googled this for a while, but no luck. Not even a single anecdote or casual comparison, not to mention proper benchmarks.