LookingGlass VS LibVF.IO

Compare LookingGlass vs LibVF.IO and see what are their differences.

LookingGlass

An extremely low latency KVMFR (KVM FrameRelay) implementation for guests with VGA PCI Passthrough. (by gnif)

LibVF.IO

A vendor neutral GPU multiplexing tool driven by VFIO & YAML. (by Arc-Compute)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
LookingGlass LibVF.IO
24 35
4,479 771
- 3.0%
9.5 3.1
11 days ago 5 months ago
C Nim
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

LookingGlass

Posts with mentions or reviews of LookingGlass. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-12.
  • VirGL
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    Unfortunately AMD cards suffer from a reset bug, still.

    The reset bug being that you can pass through the card fine, once. But if you try to pass it through again (or the card experiences an issue and needs to reset), they get caught in some kind of bad state and won’t work until power is removed and restored. Which requires a reboot or a only slightly less disruptive dance with system power states.

    For vega and 5000 series gpu’s, there’s https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset

    Incidentally, nvidia gpus are so good at resetting, they’ve probably done so without you noticing. If the screen ever goes black for a fraction of a second and returns in normal usage, it was probably because it reset itself.

    The lower 6000 series lower than the 6800’s for example may or may not have the issue. It seems most “reference” cards are fine, but custom vendor cards often but not always have issues. My reference 6700 works fine, but a sapphire 6700 probably won’t.

    And the 7000 series is also fucky in a new way somehow. Gnif knows far more about this than me, and has basically thrown up his hands at how AMD doesn’t care. He’s made occasional posts about it on https://forum.level1techs.com/

    Gnif is also responsible for Looking glass: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass

  • Virtual Machine stinkyness
    1 project | /r/linuxquestions | 1 May 2023
    You could try LookingGlass. That may require two GPUs.
  • scrcpy 2.0 is released, with audio support!
    3 projects | /r/linux | 12 Mar 2023
    It's a pair of apps, one runs on a Windows virtual machine, the other on the host OS, that uses shared memory to copy a passed-through GPUs frame buffer. Runs fast enough to get 4k/120fps very low latency, so if you have a spare GPU you can game on it in Windows, from a Linux desktop. https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass
  • Can you make a passed through GPU display to a emulated display in virt-manager?
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 5 Mar 2023
    Check out https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass if you can accept a separate window.
  • looking glass doesn't detect my mouse
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 4 Feb 2023
    then everything looks normal. It's all up to EGL though, as looking-glass really doesn't have any code that handles image scaling (see here).
  • Looking glass B6 released!
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 20 Dec 2022
  • AMD RX580 passthrough with looking glass doesn't work
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 8 Oct 2022
  • The Death of the PCIe Expansion Card
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Sep 2022
    https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/tree/master/ plus https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass works pretty well. If you use an Intel GPU, particularly one of their new Arc dedicated GPUs, it supports the functionality on the consumer grade hardware without any trickery and you just need Looking Glass to map the outputs.
  • Passing audio from 1 VM to another for final mixing?
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 8 Apr 2022
    I'd like to introduce you to Looking Glass as a much higher quality and lower latency alternative to NDI when you are trying to relay frames between virtual machines within the same computer. With a patched nvidia driver to enable nvfbc on the gaming VM there is almost zero performance penalty when capturing gameplay. It also has options for audio, which I don't use because they didn't exist when I was configuring my system. I have a similar use case (gaming and streaming) and hardware (5950X + two gpus). I am not using proxmox, however. My configuration using QEMU and libvirt has this XML:
  • Looking Glass Beta 5 Released!
    2 projects | /r/VFIO | 26 Dec 2021
    What stopping from tagging a stable release? The milestone has no open issues.

LibVF.IO

Posts with mentions or reviews of LibVF.IO. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-07.
  • run 2 VMs with 1 game on each
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 4 Oct 2023
    Maybe you can try LibVF.IO
  • What GPU would you buy for a gaming server?
    2 projects | /r/cloudygamer | 7 Jun 2023
  • GPU virtualization?
    3 projects | /r/kvm | 20 May 2023
    I'm on Linux and I'm running a 3070 Ti (Nvidia). I have always wanted to do GPU virtualization but because NVIDIA won't release vGPU for consumer card no one can do it without crossing legal red tape or problems with bricking your GPU. I did find this [https://github.com/jamesstringerparsec/Easy-GPU-PV] however it is only for windows, I found this [https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/] and does not work with my GPU, and this [https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock] and can't get it to work. Done any one know an alternative on Linux that work just like this, overcoming these problems (on KVM)?
  • Local Multiplayer
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 7 Apr 2023
    If you are willing to thinker with you gpu driver you could look up libvfio and create multiple VM with the same gpu.
  • Need help ASAP. Computer hangs at grub ""
    2 projects | /r/Fedora | 29 Jan 2023
    It seems they have issues with recent drivers/kernel, too: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/issues/61
  • Anyone running vGPU unlock in their system? How is it going?
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 30 Nov 2022
    I ran it like a year ago it was fine but not for my workflow. Might revisit the setup soon since it matured a lot since then. I suggest you also look at: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO
  • Want to try to switch to linux again. Need some info.
    8 projects | /r/linux | 13 Nov 2022
    For Affinity, I don't know. I have heard of people using Photoshop via VM, the problem usually comes when you need to utilize a lot of GPU because outside of GPU passthrough (might worth researching single-GPU passthrough and libvfio if you don't want to use two GPUs), GPU performance isn't great for VMs. I did find a few threads on the subject of Affinity on Linux, though, so maybe those could help.
  • Rx 7900 xtx based on slides is 10-15% slower than 4090 using 95 less watts and costs $600 less
    4 projects | /r/Amd | 3 Nov 2022
    I feel you on this. Looking forward to running libvf. Wine has come a long ways, but I ended up keeping a old PC a secondary to not deal with the hacking/workarounds to run some games. Using the older system for my Linux.
  • Why do we call them "display managers"
    1 project | /r/linux | 15 Sep 2022
    It's theoretically possible using a method like libvfio. This should allow you to split your gpu into 2 virtual gpus. It's designed for use with a vm, but could likely work with multi seat
  • Ask HN: What's the best source code you've read?
    46 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2022
    Perhaps not the "best" source code I've ever read, but libVF.io had some beautiful code for what's generally gnarly system-glue code. The iommu setup code is a good example and inspires me to think that system-glue code doesn't need to be gross or impenetrable: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/blob/master/src/libv...

    Another one I've appreciated reading (and learned more about 2d graphics from) is Pixie, a 2d graphics library written in Nim. Here's the implementation of a fair subset of SVG paths: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/path...

    And one last one for basic algorithms: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/version-1-6/lib/pure/al...

    Of course Knuth's original code is still some of the best classic code. K&R's original C book is a classic.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing LookingGlass and LibVF.IO you can also consider the following projects:

OSX-KVM - Run macOS on QEMU/KVM. With OpenCore + Monterey + Ventura + Sonoma support now! Only commercial (paid) support is available now to avoid spammy issues. No Mac system is required.

vgpu_unlock - Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer grade GPUs.

kvm-guest-drivers-windows - Windows paravirtualized drivers for QEMU\KVM

gvt-linux

barrier - Open-source KVM software

Easy-GPU-PV - A Project dedicated to making GPU Partitioning on Windows easier!

Magpie - An all-purpose window upscaler for Windows 10/11.

linux - Linux kernel source tree

sndcpy - Android audio forwarding (scrcpy, but for audio)

ROCm - AMD ROCm™ Software - GitHub Home [Moved to: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm]

QtScrcpy - Android real-time display control software

linux-intel-lts