I'm building my new home machine right now and as usual this will be a heavily overloaded workstation that will serve as development and testing machine, file server and game console (plus I'm adding TV cards and multimedia streaming for my home network).

Since these use cases work against each other (file server is unavailable when the machine is used as game console), I'm heavily considering the use of Xen to provide everything at once. Performance shouldn't be an issue in general, but the game console use case definitely requires direct access to a GPU.

Therefore I have several questions:

is this feasible in general?

is the GPU passthrough usable enough with non-server GPUs?

when buying, what technologies should I look for on the motherboard (most likely choosing Gigabyte + Intel CPU again)

is there some virtualization technology creeping on the horizon that is worth waiting for?

how good is Xen at dividing resources? the file-server and multimedia-streaming portion of the workstation has to work even if the game console part is eating 100% of its resources and vice-versa

the system will run on top of 8 disks with software Raid6 and LVM, should I buy a dedicated disk for the game console portion of the system? I have read about some problem with Xen and I/O performance



Any input will be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I won't mind using other technology then Xen, but I'm unaware of any other virtualization platform that supports GPU passthrough.