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Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

looking-glass.io

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Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#41

Post by Anunayj »

mongol wrote: post #35
Xenograph wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the title of the post. You can run your VM in a regular window but at high performance (think gaming and professional stuff that's GPU heavy). You otherwise can't do this without a hardware KVM switch (or tossing the VM and just dual booting). Hardware KVM switches are expensive and often don't work very well. And still, with a KVM switch it wouldn't be running inside a window. It would consume your whole scr…

Is it possible to run Windows in KVM, without the extra GPU or KVM switch, but with degraded performance? Not for gaming, but for example for Office use?

yes you can, (Atleast if you can handle the extra CPU and Disk I/O). I think you should checkout winapps [1] which RDP's into the vm to give you a pretty seamless experiance.

P.S. Disk I/O can be a severe bottleneck on HDDs, so try this with a SSD.

[1]. https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#42

Post by Rd6n6 »

Anunayj wrote: post #36
29athrowaway wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use Proton. Install games from Steam directly.

Atleast right now, most anticheat software aren't available for Linux, You need a Windows kernel for them to run. This can however change as Steam plans to use SteamOS (based on Arch) as their primary OS on the SteamDeck.

I hope they make it opt in. I don’t really want an anti cheat snooping around my Linux system without my knowing

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#43

Post by [deleted] »

29athrowaway wrote: post #37
Anunayj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atleast right now, most anticheat software aren't available for Linux, You need a Windows kernel for them to run. This can however change as Steam plans to use SteamOS (based on Arch) as their primary OS on the SteamDeck.

And only a minority of games do require anticheat.

[deleted]

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#44

Post by throwawayswede »

JustStoppinIn89 wrote: post #26
mongol wrote: post #23

What does this do that regular KVM + Qemu does not?

It provides bare metal access to the entire hardware stack. So for instance you could run Linux via your integrated GPU (the one on many consumer CPUs) while passing through your dedicated GPU to the Windows VM. This is how I "gamed on Linux" from 2018~2020 when I ran Ubuntu as my primary OS. It's incredibly finicky to set up (shocker, I know!) but if you're able to get it working it's truly amazing. Talking like 1%…

Can you elaborate on the finickiness of it? What kind of "fixes" you needed to do, and how often really, and with a cause or just random with no precursors?

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#45

Post by Kiboneu »

Reminds me of the time I'd use a patched ACPI table on my gaming VM to mock a battery for the NVIDIA driver (similar to [0]). The drivers checked and deliberately failed when a battery wasn't present in conjunction with a mobile GPU.

Setting up looking glass itself wasn't much of a problem though. I got some AAA games cutting on my gentoo laptop like butter, though the mouse movement was more jelly unless I VFIOd my mouse/kb as well. Sound went through Scream over a socket.

Nowadays I play on my Xbox. I ditched gentoo. I've gotten old. Do you, reader, assume that I've also checked out and gone full windows?

If you do, then guess again. I'm about to port my whole gentoo gaming setup to NixOS and it will probably take me about 15 minutes, and ~ 5 - 10 minutes a year just to maintain. How much time do you spend fiddling with your windows and driver updates? Oh, wait...

0: https://old.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/ebo2uk/nvidia_geforce...

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#46

Post by tbr1 »

Rd6n6 wrote: post #40

The question everyone is wondering: is this ready for serious use for gaming and productivity (Eg, photoshop or game development)? Or is it very hard to get a smooth workflow going? If the workflow is not great, is there a clear path to solving that?

It's quite easy to get it set up once you have a VM with GPU passthrough running (for which there are plenty of guides available online) -- just a double-click installation of a service on the Windows side, compiling a cmake project on the Linux side, and (optionally, for some extra performance) compiling a Linux kernel module.

After that it kind of just works, and continues working. I use it to play games and run Office apps, and have not had it break on me in a ~year of use. (Disclaimer: I occasionally contribute to the project now, but remember being impressed at how easy it was to get going when I first tried it out. Getting the VM working at all was the hardest part of the endeavor, but only took a few hours.)

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#48

Post by Anunayj »

Rd6n6 wrote: post #42
Anunayj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atleast right now, most anticheat software aren't available for Linux, You need a Windows kernel for them to run. This can however change as Steam plans to use SteamOS (based on Arch) as their primary OS on the SteamDeck.

I hope they make it opt in. I don’t really want an anti cheat snooping around my Linux system without my knowing

yup, though since they will require administrative permissions, I don't think valve will go around making you install it unless you play the specific game. Also I don't really understand how GPLv2 and kernel modules work, but I wonder if AntiCheats would be forced to open source themselves? Probably not honestly.

Edit: If anyone wanna read Linus's thoughts on it [1]. TL;DR It's a legal gray area.

[1]. https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#49

Post by AYoung010 »

tbr1 wrote: post #46
Rd6n6 wrote: post #40

The question everyone is wondering: is this ready for serious use for gaming and productivity (Eg, photoshop or game development)? Or is it very hard to get a smooth workflow going? If the workflow is not great, is there a clear path to solving that?

It's quite easy to get it set up once you have a VM with GPU passthrough running (for which there are plenty of guides available online) -- just a double-click installation of a service on the Windows side, compiling a cmake project on the Linux side, and (optionally, for some extra performance) compiling a Linux kernel module. After that it kind of just works, and continues working. I use it to play games and run Of…

Just to tack on, I set up windows with GPU pass-through and looking glass on my new laptop over the course of about 3 hours of on-and-off work using the excellent guide over at https://asus-linux.org/wiki/vfio-guide/

Re: Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

#50

Post by geocrasher »

JustStoppinIn89 wrote: post #27
Xenograph wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you forgot to mention why you didn't like it.

Not him but I'll echo the same thing. Unless I absolutely have no other choice, I'm not going back to this setup. It's how I "gamed on Linux" for a couple years. Support is basically you and you alone. The dev for Looking Glass is active but the man isn't your personal tech assistant so often you're just doing A/B testing to make something work. For me, I just didn't want to fiddle with my home desktop that much. I w…

The fiddle factor is why I'm using W10 as well. Linux is great, but on the desktop I just need things to work as-is. Linux on the desktop still doesn't have that. Maybe next year ;-)
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