Game Streaming VM utilizing Sunshine leads to no video with Windows 11

Operating Systems & Open Source Virtualization
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I have a few Gaming VM setup on Almalinux 10 with VFIO and PCIe Passthrough, one being a bazzite install and the other being Windows 11. I daily drive a mini PC and power up my gaming PC whenever I play and use Moonlight/Sunshine to remote in to play games.

I run both VMs using the kvm default network and have a few firewall rules using firewalld set to NAT the ports to a static IP I set both VMs.

The bazzite VM has no issues connecting via Moonlight and streaming properly. However when connecting to the Windows VM, I am able to load the webUI and make a connection to sunshine in Moonlight. I am able to start a stream and when it loads I can hear audio and looking through a physical screen I can see that my inputs are being sent as well. The only thing that is broken is the actual video stream, which just loads up a black window before eventually closing and throwing an error about ports being unreachable.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be going on here? I’d really like to avoid just throwing the VMs straight onto the LAN if at all possible.

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I had the same problem when using latest virtio drivers for VM NIC, it happened suddently after a Windows 11 update from been working fine before.
I had to revert to virtio-win-0.1.248-1 for it the function again. You could try it. I did never get to the bottom of the proper cause but tcpdump showed trunked UDP packages which lead me to trying downgraded drivers. Good luck!

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Thanks!

I was able to connect with that network driver version.

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I’ve narrowed this down to a UDP Segmentation Offload bug in virtio-net. I’m not sure what the direct cause of this is. But it appears USO in virtio-net is a relatively new addition, since Kernel ~6.2 and QEMU ~8.0. You can disable it on a Windows guest, running PowerShell as admin:

Disable-NetAdapterUso -Name “Ethernet”

Substitute the adapter name for your own (You can get adapter names using Get-NetAdapter).

This works with the latest driver (currently 0.1.285-1).

Ideally this is done host side using Libvirt, ensuring that whatever the guest does it’s never enabled (previous commands are not required if you choose this route):

I.e.

<domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>
  ...
  <devices>
    <interface type='network'>
      <source network='default'/>
      <model type='virtio'/>
      <alias name='ua-net0'/>            <!-- specify a user alias -->
    </interface>
  </devices>

  <qemu:override>
    <qemu:device alias='ua-net0'>
      <qemu:frontend>
        <qemu:property name='host_uso'   type='bool' value='false'/>
        <qemu:property name='guest_uso4' type='bool' value='false'/>
        <qemu:property name='guest_uso6' type='bool' value='false'/>
      </qemu:frontend>
    </qemu:device>
  </qemu:override>
</domain>

I hope this helps anyone use the current driver without running into these issues!

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If I could give you a hug through the forum I would.

Background: I have Bazzite as host, virt-manager (KVM+qemu) as Hypervisor / vm Mmanager and a Windows 11 VM. I have created a virtual bridge so the VM is directly connected to my network. I run sunshine on the VM. Connection would fail if I try to connect with moonlight from the host to the VM but would work flawlessly if I connect from any other device on the same network. I was nearly pulling my hair out with that one.