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

looking-glass.io

251–260 of 312 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doe…

Valorant specifically actually does this to a degree, and there was a quick article written by one of their anti-cheat developers that roughly explains their approach.

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...

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

#252
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).

How is the IO (particularly random IO) performance in Windows? In my experience that's been where VMs still have a long ways to go. Even kvm2 Linux on Linux VMs have severe IO performance deficits compared to native.

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

#253

I'm an engineering software contractor and every client has a whole bucket load of outdated IDEs and random USB interface drivers they want me to install on my machine.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

You don't even have to let the guest know it is netbooting. I use ESXi with one Solaris (Illumos) guest, which runs ZFS over everything and exports iSCSI back to ESXi. The other guests all think they have native storage and I can do whatever I want with the underlying ZFS filesystem.

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

#254
post #233
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t CS:GO run on Linux? I exclusively play dota 2 on Linux and it performs better than in Windows imo.

it does, but you can only play matchmaking AFAIK, ESEA and FaceIT don't support linux for their anti-cheats.

Interesting, I didn't even know you had external parties providing league based (I'm guessing) match making. All matches in Dota 2 run through the official valve coordinator or are pre-made lobbies. There is a LAN only build iirc, but not widely available to the public.

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

#255
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't mention VFIO without mentioning the amazing subreddit, r/VFIO[0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Even more amazing on the old interface: https://old.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Indeed. The new Reddit interest is horrid.

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

#256
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a vfio setup as well but with two GPUs (one integrated, one dedicated) and hotswap the dedicated GPU between the two whenever I’m playing games (I play on both Linux and Windows).

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)

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the server should never send them information on what's behind the wall.

You want to render all graphics on the server? I’m not sure that’s really a tractable suggestion.

Why would that be necessary? You realize the server already has to do a line of sight calculation to determine if a shot hits right?

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doe…

Right it’s not a realistic suggestion as not even the client does it in software!

Why do you think that? The server needs to at the very least trace a line for a shot. There is nothing difficult or slow about that. Before you say that it is done with a z-buffer or something similar, think about third person camera angles or how older games did the same thing. You might want to pull back on being so certain if you don't have experience with game engines or graphics.

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

#259

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…

The specification you present is a bit unclear.

Any modern virtualization has very fast CPU virtualization (it's hard to say near-native, as there are always corner cases), and snapshotting tools. I don't know about Sharepoint; the "clone installs" is a bit fuzzy too, but one can clone installed systems by just copying the underlying image file and ensuring that it has a unique identifier (and updating the guest O/S license, if required).

If GPU matters, VFIO definitely is part of the solution.

However, if you're trying to achieve a sort-of full system passthrough (eg. because of drivers that have bugs related to certain hardware components, which it seems to be your situation), this will never happen, because certain parts of the guest need to be necessarily emulated (e.g. chipset). Even passing a USB port is not easy - one actually needs to pass the whole hubs (AFAIK a port may belong to two hubs - USB 2 and USB 3).

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

#260
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't mention VFIO without mentioning the amazing subreddit, r/VFIO[0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Even more amazing on the old interface: https://old.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Or you can just go into your reddit settings and change back to the old interface permanently. I have that enabled and both these links are the same to me.
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