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

201–210 of 312 posts

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

#201

Post by zbrozek »

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?

You can also pass through more than just a GPU. I pass through an NVMe disk and a USB controller, effectively giving me a full second computer within my workstation. It's honestly fantastic.

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

#202

Post by Sebb767 »

Deathmax wrote: post #177
egeozcan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't disclose to the client anything not in their view. I know this is sometimes impossible and/or too costly to implement but it should be possible to find a compromise that prevents most of the blatant cheaters, eventually. Also helpers like: In any score event, for randomly selected players, analyze the last actions taken. You just cannot trust the clients. People will find creative ways of reading the memory of…

> Don't disclose to the client anything not in their view. Either full of edges cases (how do you efficiently compute visibility, and can you prevent models from popping in as a result of latency) or computationally expensive[0]. Valorant, CSGO, League of Legends, Dota 2 are some of the games that I know about that implement server-side occluding to minimise the impact of wallhacks, but eventually a client will still…

> can you prevent models from popping in as a result of latency

Can you do that well enough on the client? The client can add some prediction on where someone is moving, but so can the server. And enemies killing you due to lag is happening already with current architectures.

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

#203

Post by Nullabillity »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #189
chevill wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most online games with anti-cheat etc. Any notable exceptions? What's the performance like compared to the same games in a native Windows install. I tried proton several months ago and I had to go back to Windows because it wasn't even close to good enough as far as compatability goes. I'd really love to abandon Windows as a desktop OS and just game in a VM though.

A pretty notable example is probably BattlEye, which is used by several major FPS games [1] like Tarkov, Rainbow Six and PUBG. They banned the use of virtual machines [2] back in 2020 and their AC solution does not work on Linux. Valve seems to be working on it [3], though their solution might be tailored to their SteamDeck hardware instead of a generic proton fix. [1]: https://www.battleye.com/ [2]: https://twitter.…

PUBG uses EasyAntiCheat these days, rather than BattlEye.

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

#204

Post by lillecarl »

zbrozek wrote: post #200
lillecarl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes that, I don't know how you manage the kb and mouse without it, but I only use it for that.

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

#205

Post by lillecarl »

aetherspawn wrote: post #186
lillecarl wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably run proxmox if I was you and kit your device with extra peripheral cards that you pass through to the VM, with ZFS you can snapshot your vm volumes and proxmox has builtin support to do full backups and either store on your local machine or ship them off to a remote location. If you pass the GPU through to Windows you're going to be essentially native speed along with great security and flexibility.…

Would you still recommend this if it was a mobile workstation [1], doing a mix of at-desk work and mobile work, utilizing peripherals like docking stations, and I was running nearly constant compute intensive workloads (Matlab)? 1: https://www.dell.com/en-au/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

I honestly have no idea, I would get another SSD and give it a shot, if it works its really quite great. Not with ZFS on mobile though, go btrfs.

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

#206

Post by josteink »

zbrozek wrote: post #201
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?

You can also pass through more than just a GPU. I pass through an NVMe disk and a USB controller, effectively giving me a full second computer within my workstation. It's honestly fantastic.

Ok. And I assume that’ll all work at PCI speeds making it much more performant than using virtio-based forwarding. Sounds neat.

Do I need to do anything besides UEFI boot my virt-manager (QEMU) VM to make use of things like this?

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

#207

Post by BuildTheRobots »

lillecarl wrote: post #172
aetherspawn wrote: post #155

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…

I would probably run proxmox if I was you and kit your device with extra peripheral cards that you pass through to the VM, with ZFS you can snapshot your vm volumes and proxmox has builtin support to do full backups and either store on your local machine or ship them off to a remote location. If you pass the GPU through to Windows you're going to be essentially native speed along with great security and flexibility.…

I could be remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure proxmox + zfs doesn't let you roll back to a snapshot that has child snapshots. If you're coming from vmware (or probably virtual box, I honestly can't remember), then the ability to be able to jump back and forth between any snapshot and branch off form there easily is really convenient and a bit jarring to loose.

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

chevill wrote: post #179
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…

> most online games with anti-cheat etc. Any notable exceptions? What's the performance like compared to the same games in a native Windows install. I tried proton several months ago and I had to go back to Windows because it wasn't even close to good enough as far as compatability goes. I'd really love to abandon Windows as a desktop OS and just game in a VM though.

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

lillecarl wrote: post #140
Kiboneu wrote: post #45

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…

I'm doing this with NixOS and too, it was really simple. NixOS unstable hasn't been problem free though, it breaks quite often in the unstable channel, most usually though I just roll the channel back and wait it out. Right now I'm stuck with kernel 5.12 because nvidias shit Linux driver support.

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by lillecarl »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #207
lillecarl wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably run proxmox if I was you and kit your device with extra peripheral cards that you pass through to the VM, with ZFS you can snapshot your vm volumes and proxmox has builtin support to do full backups and either store on your local machine or ship them off to a remote location. If you pass the GPU through to Windows you're going to be essentially native speed along with great security and flexibility.…

I could be remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure proxmox + zfs doesn't let you roll back to a snapshot that has child snapshots. If you're coming from vmware (or probably virtual box, I honestly can't remember), then the ability to be able to jump back and forth between any snapshot and branch off form there easily is really convenient and a bit jarring to loose.

The thing with proxmox is that it's quite open, you could manage ZFS snapshots outside of the proxmox system if you want, I haven't tried this specific with proxmox, I run NixOS with ZFS root and libvirt for managing the guests (vit-manager and virsh).
Post reply on HN