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

looking-glass.io

301–310 of 312 posts

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

#301

I'm an engineering software contractor and every client has a whole bucket load of outdated IDEs and random USB interface drivers they want me to install on my machine.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…

KVM? Virt-Manager? It might take an hour to learn virt-manager and some of its quirks, but it absolutely can do everything you request here, I do so very regularly. If you want a low-maintenance version, you could just snag someone's NixOS config - you'd have an easy to reproduce environment that just ensures virt-manager and a really light-weight window manager are installed and then you're done. Virt-Manager does s…

Do you happen to know any tips for good online resources for virt-manager and features like this other than tedious reading of manual pages and trial & error?

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see we are at the "you're being mean to me" stage in the discussion instead of the "I should not spread misinformation then doubled down on it" stage. No one is abusing you and you aren't a victim when someone wonders why you're misinforming people. If what you are saying doesn't add up (temporal chicken and egg, partial location information etc), focus on that instead of attacking people that are giving you th…

I don't agree - but I think you're really just trying to get a reaction by being as aggressive and contrary as possible rather than actually going on what I've written, so I'm going to leave you to it from here.

Parent: "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."

You: "But... it is done with a z-buffer. If an opponent is obscured behind a nearby pillar or something, that's not going to be culled in software - that's done by the hardware z-buffer as part of the render process."

Then I explained why this doesn't make sense on the server as a generalization and isn't necessary from a technical angle.

Then you ignored that you were both snarky and wrong, provided your own source which directly contradicts what you originally said and ultimatly called yourself a victim of aggression when I pointed this out.

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

#303

Does anyone know if you can do color accurate work with this setup (non HDR) ? To go into detail: are monitor color calibration from Linux (is that even existing) and Windows conflicting here?

Looking Glass is lossless, so provided you can do your color calibration under Linux then it would work fine.

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

#304
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no, but I also don't like living my life by the lowest denominator, I understand how it works, so I don't "break" it by forgetting how to use it. My father's office365 broke last month because of multiple mailboxes, not because something was wrong, but because logged onto the wrong account without the right permissions.

Well I hope you don't end up like me, asking yourself "Why I'm still doing this?" and not finding a good answer.

To be honest, I'm doing it because I like the idea of owning my own machine, the flexibility of a VM and because I want to learn more about Nix & Linux.

Trouble is, now that my Nix setup is good for everyday use (Not yet development, I wish to see Flakes mature soon) I barely ever tinker with it, might be because it's summertime here too, doesn't encourage me to geek out too much.

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

#305

FWIW, I got native windows performance on a Linux host just using virtualbox and (the key part) a virtual disk file that I manually edited to point directly to a windows partition on disk. This made it obvious that file IO was the bottleneck...

Is it really native performance? I find it hard to believe but now I'm curious and will have to try this out...

Yeah as sfink said (and I should have clarified and used different vocabulary), this was "native" performance for most typical tasks like programming, it wasn't a gaming setup. Though there was still hardware accelerated graphics through VirtualBox.

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

#306
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KVM? Virt-Manager? It might take an hour to learn virt-manager and some of its quirks, but it absolutely can do everything you request here, I do so very regularly. If you want a low-maintenance version, you could just snag someone's NixOS config - you'd have an easy to reproduce environment that just ensures virt-manager and a really light-weight window manager are installed and then you're done. Virt-Manager does s…

Do you happen to know any tips for good online resources for virt-manager and features like this other than tedious reading of manual pages and trial & error?

Libvirt manual is pretty good

https://libvirt.org/docs.html

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

#307
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does this also work for audio?

E.g. could you run a high end DAW on the guest with the same performance?

If not, is it something that might be added later?

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

#308
post #59
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked into this project (and related GPU pass through projects) a few years ago. Putting the discussion and even some issue tracking into a "support thread" in this forum makes getting information really difficult. It's the same experience when you want to install LinageOS and realize you have to go through a long thread on XDA and sometimes reddit to solve any issue you may have.

We have tried very hard to rectify this with the B4 release by adding a documentation project to the repository, which is available in HTML form here: https://looking-glass.io/docs/stable/

Thank you! Although TBH linux gaming has been usable to the extent that I probably will never have to run windows ever again..

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

#309
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to switch the GPU while the host is running, that is without rebooting?

It is, see: https://stty.io/2018/07/27/running-windows-with-pci-passthro... (Relevant scripts sub-heading)

Thanks a lot, I'll check it out.

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

#310
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stil…

A few approaches to consider: 1) be fair and decide upon some value that should cover most cases, make the outliers suck it up, like some games kick those with higher pings 2) don't be fair and base the threshold of visibility on some predictions about the movement of the entities in the following ticks, based on their probable movement speeds, as well as the ping times of the each player; the player with the higher…

Interestingly, given it was one of the strategy games I was thinking of when I made that comment, the Paradox devs for CK3 commented on why they use a lockstep architecture and not sharing the state of the game by server decided POV in their dev diary a couple of days after: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/anatomy-of-a-ga...
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