A Remote KMS Linux Backend Is Being Worked On That Could Work With VNC

[smitty3268]

and look - we have a shiny new AV1 codec that'd be perfect for it

As long as you're happy to wait 1 minute for each frame.

[timofonic]

As long as you're happy to wait 1 minute for each frame.

Why? Could you please ellaborate on this? Are you just trolling?

[Tomin]

Why? Could you please ellaborate on this? Are you just trolling?

He was just exaggerating the fact that AV1 is slow to encode on current hardware.

[timofonic]

He was just exaggerating the fact that AV1 is slow to encode on current hardware.

I knew it. I just wanted to get more facts about it

[boxie]

As long as you're happy to wait 1 minute for each frame.

Yes, there would need to be some optimisation and hardware encoding support - but the bandwidth used would be tiny!

[smitty3268]

He was just exaggerating the fact that AV1 is slow to encode on current hardware.

Am I?

Honestly I haven't paid much attention to the current state of things and I'm sure there's a lot of optimization work going into AV1 right now. But I thought I heard someone had tried encoding some stuff and only got a couple frames done per minute on their cpu. I'm seeing reports of it being 2000-3000 times slower than h264, which would put it somewhere around that level I think.

Obviously once some hardware encoding is supported that will be a lot faster.

[Tomin]

Am I?

Were you? The exaggerating part was just my interpretation but I was thinking of the performance once AV1 software is finished (so optimized) and what the performance even could be on current hardware. Of course it might be that to get any reasonable quality out of it, you need a minute per frame even on the currently fastest processors. I don't think anyone would right now use AV1 for any serious purpose on PC.

[emblemparade]

- VNC and co will mostly rely on damage to know which sub part of the screen are changing, and only transmit these rectangle (and do some lossless or lossy compresison on the subrectangles).

Sure. But you are mixing my comments together. I was comparing it to RDP, not VNC, and noting that it won't be a good solution for the desktop. RDP is vastly superior to VNC on the desktop because it's window-aware.

You also mention hardware compression being available through this a benefit to gaming. Well, you have the same access in user mode (and even Steam streaming on Linux supports it). Games switch to fullscreen in user mode and don't do buffer copying. That works right now. There's no advantage to doing it in the kernel other than skipping a few hops. I sincerely doubt this would provide noticeably superior performance from a user's perspective. Again, the real bottleneck will always be the network, which is orders of magnitude slower than anything the kernel is doing for usermode.

Move along, folks, this is very cool but it's a niche feature that won't affect most desktop users in any meaningful way.

[oiaohm]

Sure. But you are mixing my comments together. I was comparing it to RDP, not VNC, and noting that it won't be a good solution for the desktop. RDP is vastly superior to VNC on the desktop because it's window-aware.

You also mention hardware compression being available through this a benefit to gaming. Well, you have the same access in user mode (and even Steam streaming on Linux supports it). Games switch to fullscreen in user mode and don't do buffer copying. That works right now. There's no advantage to doing it in the kernel other than skipping a few hops. I sincerely doubt this would provide noticeably superior performance from a user's perspective. Again, the real bottleneck will always be the network, which is orders of magnitude slower than anything the kernel is doing for usermode.

Move along, folks, this is very cool but it's a niche feature that won't affect most desktop users in any meaningful way.

Realy you are not thinking. Having a software KMS does not mean you cannot use a Window aware solution as well. Even you are using a windows aware protocol application may still need to see proper screen information to function.

Step one to building a remote desktop solution even RDP starts out this way is Full screen. Yes early versions of RDP are not windows aware. Next steps consider implementing window aware or buffer aware. Vmware has mucked around with buffer aware forVirtual Desktop Infrastructure seams to provide most of the same benefits of Window aware but does not require host operating system software modification other than graphics drivers.

There are a few implementations of VNC that are buffer aware this includes the never finalised VNC v4 tightvnc.

Really with the information that will be in the DRI/DRM layer buffer aware should be able to be done without requiring user-mode modifications.