Looking Glass Beta 2 Officially Released

Software & Operating Systems Looking Glass
1

After weeks of testing of Beta 2 Release Candidate 4 and a few minor fixes, I am extremely proud to announce that Looking Glass Beta 2 is now officially available.

URL: https://looking-glass.hostfission.com

Changes since Beta 1

  • Don’t hide the cursor when SPICE is disabled
  • The host application can now install and run as a service removing
    the need for PsExec or a scheduled task to start the application.
  • There is now a NSIS installer for the host application which
    installs the service and will handle seamless upgrades without the
    need to uninstall prior versions.
  • The host application now runs with High scheduler priority
  • The host application will now stop capture and go to sleep if there
    are no subscribers (clients).
  • The host application no longer opens the log file but instead shows
    it’s location. This is to prevent the elevated process from being
    abused to run processes as the SYSTEM user account.
  • The client framebuffer copy spinlock is less agressive preventing
    CPU stalls on some systems due to starving the system scheduler.
  • Installing the spice guest tools no longer breaks mouse support.
  • Fixed EGL frame ordering bug.
  • Fixed frame limiter issues.
  • Better cursor icon support on initial connect.
  • The LG client can no longer be run as root.
  • Host now reports it’s version to the client for logging and debug.
  • Client now reports host and client versions on mismatch.
  • Performance improvments to EGL.
  • New client option to capture input by default at startup.
  • Timers implemented for the linux host (now builds again).
  • SIMD implemented to improve framebuffer copy.
  • Don’t stop the host LGMP timer when restarting capture.
  • Boost GPU kernel thread priority so vsync/frame limits are not.
    needed anymore.
  • OBS plugin now always fetches the most recent frame on the frame
    tick.
  • Improved frame sync logic in the client
  • Always use spice mouse host mode to fix issue with spice guest tools
    breaking mouse support.
  • LGMP submodule updated to incorporate fix that was causing random
    invalid timeouts.
  • [misc] minor readme update
  • [client] drop the default FPS target to 60 now that the fps is
    dynamic

I (Geoffrey McRae) am the primary developer behind this project and I
have invested thousands of hours of development time into it.

If you like this project and find it useful and would like to help out
you can support me directly using the following platforms.

10 Likes
2

Hi there!
First of all, mad thanks for all the work that you put into this project, it saved my sanity at my job, when I have to work in a Windoof environment.
Also gaming is a lot easier now :>

Unfortunately B2-RC4 hangs sometimes. Im trying to get you some useful logs. So I may edit this post.
Setup:
2560x1440 at 144 HZ => VM Config 32 (for the memory).
Guest GPU: AMD (RX 570)
Host GPU: 1070TI

It seems to hang, when the guest is busy loading from storage sth and the OS hangs itself just a moment, but not always.

Cheers!

3

No worries, but please create a new thread for this.

4

Great work!! is there any plan to add some sort of sound system to looking glass? my current network-based sound setup for my VM is not ideal. IVSHMEM sound would make it alot nicer.

5

LG Client? OB? this still require the guest be hosted on linux host with KVM no?

6

No, QEMU already has inbuilt audio emulation that works well if you use the JACK backend I added to it.

Windows guest on Linux

1 Like
7

Would Looking Glass benefit from IO_uring?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KVM-IO-uring-Passthrough-LF2020

8

No, it’s an entirely different workload, and we are already using shared RAM, which is bare metal performance, nothing is faster short of GPU-GPU transfers.