QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes

[Yttrium]

I'm just so frustrated over my ventures into windows VMs on linux.

Dont listen to people dismissing your grievances. Right now on linux its indeed true that alot of features cannot be emulated correctly trough a VM. only with a GPU passtrough will you get a smooth experience. This has something to do with both the inability for GPU's to be properly shared resources (Which is partly a hardware limitation) and the kernel always having to sit inbetween the two monster components.

Might I suggest to try Wine instead, You'll have less overhead and Wine is far better at handling graphic applications. You'll also not have to bother with virtual machines as much.

[Quackdoc]

First and foremost, apologies for any mistypes, I am on a laptop that has a particularly bad keyboard, and I have a cold.

I don't know about virtualbox, I haven't actually touched it in years, but I recall with vmware player last I tried I had some major issues with certain programs not working because it only supports a specific set of apis, I think maybe even it supported just directx9 and only directx9 rendering and I couldn't run anything that was opengl or dx11, or god forbid vulkan (I actually know they're working on implementing vulkan now... but on vmware workstation), I at least know they still didn't have dx11 support in it late last year (some tech preview for vmware workstation did tho)

It's not all roses and sunshine over there, clearly... I am obviously going to give vmware and virtualbox a second try though now that you mention it, it's been very long since I last gave them a shot.

no DX11 support as of now without an nvidia GPU on linux with vmware sadly, I assume this is due to proprietary APIs. I am unsure of the needs of photoshop, but I have heard it works.

Am using qemu command line, I have not tried troubleshooting this issue, only possibly related command I have would be: -

device hda-output

My first thing to try would be adding in something like:

-audiodev pa,id=pa1,server=/run/user/1000/pulse/native

Which is (yes) something I pulled from someone else's config online. I just didn't get there yet because I have priorities to make other things work first, like I said, venting.

It could be worth trying.

I don't know what you mean when you say qxl+spice and even less what you mean when you say sdl/gtk, I mean individually I know what these things are, but in this context... When I used spice, I tried spicy, remmina and remote-viewer. All of them 'worked' but the experience was bloody awful, I did not look into getting them to work better, I did not even know it was possible to make them work better (is it actually?)

And I was under the impression looking glass required an external display, I am on a laptop with no room for an external display (I think I mentioned that clearly when I was venting)

Qemu has 2 relevant parts of video out. Display and GPU. Spice, VNC, SDL, GTK, are available Display Outs, Virtio-gpu, QXL, vmware etc. are virtual GPUs.

There is No need for a dummy plug with GVT-g. no need for external display at all with GVTg

But if the virtio-gpu drivers are working on something for this, that's a consolation at least. (No idea what DOD refers to tho)

Still, if you have anything more for me to go on than just pointing towards protocols and libraries I'm all ears.

Look up GVTg Looking glass on youtube, there are plenty of good setup videos on YT. partiularily a 14~min one from someone installing on manjaro (steps are similar on other distros)

Well there's a bit of a story behind that, at least if you mean it the way I think you mean it, but the short of it is that I have tried using virtualbox and vmware player in the distant past and they never worked out for me or more like just felt like miserable failures for my purposes, things like vmware player maybe could provide the performance I wanted but wouldn't launch photoshop or something because it didn't support the latest version of opengl it was using or whatever, and virtualbox launching things properly but being so laggy it just felt like shit, so my impression of those things are "virtualization technology that's not good enough"

But now that you said they're actually capable of what I am seeking, maybe the situation has changed, I have my doubts about vmware player (maybe vmware workstation can do it?... But idk, it's kinda expensive, and do I really want to give money to a company that locks documentation for it's products behind a paywall?...) but virtualbox deserves another chance at least.

Thank you for your insights.

Qemu should work fine, and the best for what you need assuming t gets setup properly. Definitely recommend tinkering around with qemu some more. but research what you are doing, and dont just copy + paste. and you will be on your way to learning a very valuable skill set, even if you don't use it.

[schmidtbag]

rabcor Have you installed the guest additions (on the guest OS) for Virtualbox? That makes a big difference.
Also worth looking into VirtualGL, to provide a little better GPU acceleration, albeit, no DX.

[Quackdoc]

rabcor Have you installed the guest additions (on the guest OS) for Virtualbox? That makes a big difference.
Also worth looking into VirtualGL, to provide a little better GPU acceleration, albeit, no DX.

I thought virtualGL only worked on unix clients?

[Ladis]

I don't know about current versions of Photoshop, but older ones work in WINE fine. And if you want the full experience, you can use a real GPU in a VM. One monitor is not a limit - just plug cables from both GPUs to it and switch using buttons on the monitor.

[schmidtbag]

I thought virtualGL only worked on unix clients?

Nope, I'm pretty sure it works in Windows clients. Maybe you're thinking of VirGL? They're actually not the same thing, despite having similar functions and names.

[Quackdoc]

Nope, I'm pretty sure it works in Windows clients. Maybe you're thinking of VirGL? They're actually not the same thing, despite having similar functions and names.

I know, I'm pretty sure virtual GL only works with x applications

[Gryffus]

I know, I'm pretty sure virtual GL only works with x applications

Official Support


These operating systems are tested and supported by The VirtualGL Project, and binary packages provided by this project should work properly with these operating systems. Any incompatibilities between VirtualGL and these operating systems will be fixed at our expense (using the VirtualGL General Fund.)

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (x86-64) releases that are in the Full Support or Maintenance Support phase (as well as work-alike distributions such as CentOS, Oracle Linux, and Scientific Linux)
  • GDM and LightDM display managers only
• Ubuntu LTS (amd64) releases that are receiving public updates
  • GDM and LightDM display managers only
• (Client only) macOS releases that are receiving security updates
• (Client only) Windows releases that are in the mainstream or extended support phase

Source: https://virtualgl.org/Documentation/OSSupport

[Gryffus]

QEMU has as much to do with Linux as ASCII does. Sure, it will run on a Linux host, and you can run a Linux guest in it. You can also run it on a Windows or a Mac OS host and have any number of non-Linux guests in it. Also, it *can* use virtualization components when emulating an x86_64 target on an x86_64 Linux host, but it is not itself a virtualization component it's a hardware emulator.

Yeah, the rule, that all Phoronix articles need to have "<new version> of this <software description>" format forced, seemed always odd to me. And sometimes it is really "funny" and leads to this kind of mistakes. Maybe the sub-headlines are generated by a bot?

[binarybanana]

For audio I recommend scream: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream
Lower latency than qemu sound emulation, no crackling and proper 7.1 channel support.
For smooth graphics using GVT-g you might need to patch qemu: https://github.com/intel/gvt-linux/issues/35
I got the best results using SPICE with remote-viewer, (-display spice-app,gl=on, but gl=es is also worth trying). It never worked as well as I would have liked because vsync doesn't work properly and is locked at 64Hz no matter what monitor mode you force. Way smoother than LookingGlass at least.

Now I use proper GPU passthrough with a dedicated monitor for games and it's pretty much perfect, faster than native even.