Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

looking-glass.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 312 posts

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

#91

Post by genewitch »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #57

I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…

I do the vfio thing as well, do you happen to remember the registry editing you had to do to stop stuttering in games? There's a program that can set and unset all the stuff you need but evidently I deleted it.

It's the only thing I am missing to build another one or rebuild the one I have. I wish I had believed it was going to work perfectly when I started and wrote everything down.

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

#92

Post by lostlogin »

Google234 wrote: post #65
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #57

I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…

Better anti cheats won’t allow setups like this.

‘Better’?

Why are VMs being blocked?

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

#93

Post by genewitch »

imhoguy wrote: post #81
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #6

One thing that isn't clear from the website is that it requires two GPUs, one for the host and one for the VM.

Wouldn't be it possible to let Linux/Xorg give up GPU for a time Windows is used? Which could still let me access it via VNC from Windows. My native platform is Xubuntu on AMD Renoir laptop.

If this uses vfio then no, the host never sees the GPU, it's blind to it from boot.

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

#94

Post by josteink »

vbarrielle wrote: post #78
thejosh wrote: post #4

It performs really well. I love qemu/libvirt - the crazy thing is if you have two disks and use one to boot Windows, you can mount the disk then boot into that when using Linux and have that running off another video card (I have two in my PC, one AMD and and nVidia).

That sounds very interesting. Does that mean I should be able to load a VM containing my windows partition fron linux, even without a dedicated GPU? Do you have a pointer to a tutorial explaining the setup ?

> That sounds very interesting. Does that mean I should be able to load a VM containing my windows partition fron linux, even without a dedicated GPU?

That works fine.

I do that at work to avoid nuking/tampering with the Windows installation provided to me by IT, while running Linux as my main OS from a second volume.

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

#95

Post by ghostly_s »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #57

I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…

The host is headless? So you're streaming the display via VNC or something to another system, or do you mean the host has a head but it's just being passed thru directly to the guest?

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

#96

Post by gnif »

genewitch wrote: post #91
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #57

I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…

I do the vfio thing as well, do you happen to remember the registry editing you had to do to stop stuttering in games? There's a program that can set and unset all the stuff you need but evidently I deleted it. It's the only thing I am missing to build another one or rebuild the one I have. I wish I had believed it was going to work perfectly when I started and wrote everything down.

Likely setting the NVidia drivers to use MSI (Message Signalled Interrupts)

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

#97

Post by gnif »

ghostly_s wrote: post #95
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #57

I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…

The host is headless? So you're streaming the display via VNC or something to another system, or do you mean the host has a head but it's just being passed thru directly to the guest?

The GPU is given to the guest, so the guest is driving the GPU directly making it a headless host.

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

#98

Post by josteink »

gnif wrote: post #90
Royi wrote: post #88

What would be the best solution (Performance wise) if one is only after running Photoshop + Office? Looking for a solution which is easy to install and configure.

If you want easy, this is not for you. Setting up LG first requires setting up a VFIO Virtual Machine. As for how viable it is, very... we have many members in our community that are using LG for productivity applications. For performance, very close to bare metal. In applications like Photoshop and Office you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

> If you want easy, this is not for you. Setting up LG first requires setting up a VFIO Virtual Machine.

Any quick links to how that differs from a regular QEMU/KVM setup?

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

#99

Post by unholythree »

gnif wrote: post #67
cdata wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which games do you play that require anti-cheat schemes? The last time I checked, many such games explicitly do not support running in VMs and you risk being banned by obfuscating that you are running the game in a guest OS.

Most games work just fine, just a few odd ones that decided to block VMs don't such as Tarkov. Known to work without issue are titles such as * PUBG * Battlefield 1/3/4/5 * Titanfall 1&2 * Arma 3 * 7 Days to Die * Ark * Fortnite * Apex * Halo: The Master Chief Collection * Star Wars Squadrons And many many more.

Really, is that why Tarkov drops me when I try to start a match? At least CS:GO told me their anti-cheat hated my setup (Windows 10 in a Xenserver VM) and I was able to get a refund.

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

#100

Post by wydfre »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #57

I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services. It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relativel…

You can't mention VFIO without mentioning the amazing subreddit, r/VFIO[0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Post reply on HN