Glide

Nope. I just gave it the other core of the pair so it doesn't look "starved" on the usage graph, With two cores it barely ever gets above 5% usage. It's a waste, but makes me feel less angst.

Every one I ran went without a hitch. I always follow the spaceinvader one videos on youtube. After you get it running you need to add the virtio guest services to get hibernate support, otherwise the VM can cause unraid shutdown hiccups when Windows wants an update.

I've been using this guy since April on my ASUS Prime Z590-P LGA 1200: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09K4WZ9B1/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 No issues at all running several mechanical hard drives and an optical drive. It claims to use an ASM 1166 chip. I dunno if the thing is "splitting" chip ports between connectors, but I'm getting full-tilt-boogie even when I fully populate the thing. $10/port and it just works...

I've "isolated" and "pinned" one core of my 16 core intel CPU for pfSense, and it seems to be working flawlessly except for a perhaps cosmetic defect? Nothing else is isolated or pinned. The CPU usage on the pfSense dashboard is always in the range 1-16%, but the CPU usage for that one core running the VM on the unraid dashboard is usually in the range 10-60%, sometimes peaking to 100% for a few seconds. I'm wondering why the big discrepancy? I understand they're measuring different things in different ways, but why to that large an effect? The highest usage (100%) seems to coincide with my GPU doing transcodes for Jellyfin or tdarr, but not always -- and neither of those are using much internet bandwidth so that seems weird too. Any ideas? Should I even care?

YES!!! Please?