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

looking-glass.io

191–200 of 312 posts

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

#191

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.

I fixed my stuttering by enabling cpu tuning and setting the correct cpu topology [1].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#CP...

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote this another comment, but instead of getting too much into an arms race, studios should invest more on server-side anti-cheat mechanisms. You could correlate community feedback and some machine learning, while also picking easy-to-catch impossible actions.

Server-side solutions don't catch all cheats. They can block actions that are impossible according to the game rules but they cannot prevent clients from disclosing too much information to the player about other players, or automating actions that are technically possible, like using aimbots.

This is what Valorant does and just does not work. People saying "yeah game dev are lazy, why not everything is done server side" this is really a naive view of game dev.

The short version is that you can't have a great experience for online games if you try to create a client as a dumb terminal.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server-side solutions don't catch all cheats. They can block actions that are impossible according to the game rules but they cannot prevent clients from disclosing too much information to the player about other players, or automating actions that are technically possible, like using aimbots.

You can definitely handle some of those situations server side (the key word being "some") with enough engineering effort. In regards to player positions: check which player locations are occluded and wouldn't be visible through the geometry, then only send the valid ones for each player. Of course, doing this on high tick servers could prove to be computationally intensive. In regards to aimbots: the clients already…

> In regards to player positions: check which player locations are occluded and wouldn't be visible through the geometry, then only send the valid ones for each player. Of course, doing this on high tick servers could prove to be computationally intensive.

What's your tolerance on this? Too low and players will complain that other players pop into view and kill them in the event of latency. Too high and cheaters still have access to the most valuable cases of information, when there's a chance for one player to get the drop on the other.

What about strategy games which rely on their lockstep simulation for performance? How would an RTS work if it's sending the locations of 100s of units in real time versus just player actions. Do you want to have to implement prediction and deal with warping in such a game?

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

#194
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Steam Deck announcement this week Valve mentioned they were going to work with vendors to get anti-cheat finally working, so fingers crossed.

I guess it's inevitable. It makes no sense for Windows to be the PC gaming platform; it's only inertia.

It makes sense for almost every user and developer, due to better graphics support from GPU vendors and from Microsoft for Windows.

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

#195
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.

Ive played PUBG, COD Warzone, Apex Legends, Quake Champions, maybe a few others. Of course it depends on the game but i think the perception of how many games don't work under VMs is a bit skewed. TBH every thread like this has the “but what about anti-cheat?” post which makes it seem like a big problem but i think only a tiny minority of games don’t work under VMs.

Only online multiplayer shooters (or whatever they call them these days) come with anti cheat, I think.

So... 5% of the available titles?

Most are financed by IAPs so I just stay away from them anyway.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-cheat measures end up blocking mostly the well-meaning players. I know it's sometimes too costly, but game studios should invest more on server-side security measures and mostly distrust the clients.

But distrusting the client doesn’t solve the problem. If a user can see through a wall locally how can ‘distrusting’ anything fix that? What is there to distrust? All inputs are genuine.

> If a user can see through a wall locally how can ‘distrusting’ anything fix that?

The fact that the client can remove the wall and see something behind it is due to the fact that the client is trusted to do the hiding. An untrusted client would not receive the enemy position until the enemy is visible. This, however, comes with the drawback that the server needs to do the culling - That's why pretty much nobody does it right now.

Aimhacks would still be possible, of course, but client-side anti-cheat can't prevent those either.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-cheat measures end up blocking mostly the well-meaning players. I know it's sometimes too costly, but game studios should invest more on server-side security measures and mostly distrust the clients.

But distrusting the client doesn’t solve the problem. If a user can see through a wall locally how can ‘distrusting’ anything fix that? What is there to distrust? All inputs are genuine.

Question, why can users see through walls locally, seems like there should be some sort of occlusion? I guess it's too slow to calculate and causes too much server-side processing?

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

#198

I'm an engineering software contractor and every client has a whole bucket load of outdated IDEs and random USB interface drivers they want me to install on my machine. Often this stuff has weird specific version dependencies, kernel level drivers that cause weird things to happen (like the computer to BSOD if you boot it up with other USB devices attached), random system level crashes, and when you go to the driver…

You could netboot off an iscsi target on another machine, which is backed by an image file on a zfs volume. That way you get all the nice zfs features of snapshotting, and windows just thinks it's using a hard drive.

You could even skip zfs and just use a qemu image file, with qemu-nbd you can have it present as a block device, and you can then export that block device as an iscsi target. Then you can use qemu-img for snapshotting etc.

The machine running the storage could be pretty low spec too, a nuc would do it for sure, maybe even an rpi or similar (if you go the qemu-img route, zfs on rpi is not feasible, ask me how I know :D)

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-cheat measures end up blocking mostly the well-meaning players. I know it's sometimes too costly, but game studios should invest more on server-side security measures and mostly distrust the clients.

The anti-cheat systems end up really just being more menance than use. Tons of money burned on something that cheaters will get around anyways.

It's one of those 'keeping honest people honest' things, of it were even easier I think even more people would do it?

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

#200
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.

I used to use looking glass (still sponsoring the project) but since my hardware is ancient I tried running the windows VM of a DVI to my monitor instead, and it's been so incredibly smooth along with Barrier ever since, with more horsepower I would probably go back to LG because of the convenience of being a regular window I can manage however I want.

This? https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Is the key feature clipboard sharing? Otherwise I don't know why I wouldn't redirect events with zero additional software. As-is, I press both ctrl keys and my keyboard and mouse switch to the virtual machine. The big nuisance is that I need to switch monitor inputs. That appears to be something I can automate, but simply haven't yet.

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