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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

#101

Post by gnif »

himinlomax wrote: post #89
gigatexal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only games I play are Doom Eternal and Starcraft 2 — by chance do you know if those work or if there’s a list somewhere?

SC2 works almost perfectly under Wine/Proton. Only issue is that a few custom maps crash, and there's a weird, minor performance issue at some point in the LOTV campaign menus (but not the game itself). Haven't had an issue in a ladder game in years. And I play SC2 a lot (too much).

"Almost" is the key word here, under a VFIO VM, it's 100% flawless.

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

#102

Post by darkwater »

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…

why don't you go the other way round, Windows native ane WSL2? Beside wanting to hack and learn things, obviouvsly.

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

#103

Post by zaptheimpaler »

darkwater wrote: post #102
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…

why don't you go the other way round, Windows native ane WSL2? Beside wanting to hack and learn things, obviouvsly.

Tried WSL, was buggy and had some issues with filesystem performance i think. I prefer having a 100% real linux & windows OSes that just work over slightly buggy workarounds. Plus i also host a lot of homeserver services (media server, SMB server, postgres db etc) on the linux host and its cleaner having those run on the host. If i want to do something very demanding on the host for example I can shutdown the VM.

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

#104

Post by throwaway2048 »

genewitch wrote: post #93
imhoguy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really a problem, you can unbind the VFIO driver

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

#105

Post by fulafel »

genewitch wrote: post #93
imhoguy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is stopping GPU hot plugging from working?

There was this recent improvement at least: https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.14-A...

edit: seems there are some howtos - eg https://github.com/joeknock90/Single-GPU-Passthrough

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

#106

Post by gnif »

lostlogin wrote: post #92
Google234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better anti cheats won’t allow setups like this.

‘Better’? Why are VMs being blocked?

Because some cheats use a VM environment to hide from detection as they can act on the VM from outside of it.

The solution though is not to ban VMs, but to push vendors like AMD and Intel to enable access to, and enforce usage of technologies like SEV if running inside a VM.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.6/virt/kvm/amd-memory-enc...

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

#107

Post by gnif »

77pt77 wrote: post #84
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.

What about machines with dual graphics cards, like one intel on board and another nvidia? Would that be OK? I ask because many laptops used to have similar setups.

Yes, this works for many laptops but it depends on how the laptop is internally wired. We have many members that use their iGPU for Linux, and the dGPU for the VM.

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

#108

Post by 29athrowaway »

JustStoppinIn89 wrote: post #53
29athrowaway wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use Proton. Install games from Steam directly.

This is a non-answer. Steam is not and should not be the sole source of video games on PC. This is a workaround that doesn't even work as well as you imply. > Just use Windows. Install games from developers directly. See how silly that sounds to you ?

Proton (a fork of Wine) can be used outside Steam. It's open source and hosted on github. There are also forks of Proton that are community maintained (e.g.: Glorious eggroll).

If you want to have the convenience of Steam, without Steam, you have projects like Lutris, which have community maintained scripts for each game. Those scripts are responsible for installing all the necessary dependencies and workarounds necessary for getting a game to work.

You can check https://www.protondb.com/ to see which games work well under Proton. If you don't want to use Proton, you can search the Wine application database for compatibility information: https://appdb.winehq.org/

I recommend Steam + Proton because it's the most frictionless way of getting games to work. The #1 complaint about Linux is how hard it is to do some things (like the guy I initially replied to), but it doesn't have to be that way.

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

#109

Post by gnif »

josteink wrote: post #98
gnif wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

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

#110

Post by josteink »

gnif wrote: post #109
josteink wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

Thanks.

So if I’m already UEFI booting my VMs with dedicated volumes, the key difference is how GPU pass-through is done?

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