LookingGlass VS OSX-KVM

Compare LookingGlass vs OSX-KVM and see what are their differences.

LookingGlass

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

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. (by kholia)
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LookingGlass OSX-KVM
24 263
4,479 18,343
- -
9.5 5.6
10 days ago 12 days ago
C Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 only -
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.

OSX-KVM

Posts with mentions or reviews of OSX-KVM. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-08.
  • VirtualBox KVM Public Release
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2024
    Yes, I recently had to compile some stuff on Windows (I'm on an AMD Linux host) and VirtualBox just wouldn't start Microsoft's Windows dev VM (the one they provide for free for Virtualbox). I ended up learning how to use qemu and it works great...and as a bonus I was able to run a hackintosh (via https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM) and it works near flawlessly, which was something I was never able to accomplish with Virtualbox (granted I haven't tried in a few years).

    I'm pretty happy with Qemu now, even if it's jsut a CLI interface. I was tempted to try the virt-* stuff, but honestly it seems like one more thing to learn so I'm going to hold off until I need something like copy/paste between VMs and can't figure it out in qemu direct.

  • NixThePlanet - Run macOS, Windows and more via a single Nix command + nixosModules
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 9 Dec 2023
    Working on a patch to include it as a flake input instead of vendoring it in the repo, so this should no longer be true. I use the QCOW2s for OpenCore from osx-kvm that I have not figured out how to reproduce yet https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM/blob/master/OpenCore/OpenCore.qcow2
  • [PROJECT] Working on a project called ultimate-macOS-KVM!
    2 projects | /r/VFIO | 30 Sep 2023
    For almost a year, I have been coding a little project in Python intended to piggyback on the framework of kholia's OSX-KVM project, known as ultimate-macOS-KVM, or ULTMOS.
  • FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Aug 2023
    I just researched a bit, mac os x guest vm with pcie passthrough seems possible on linux.

    Dropping the links below:

    https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

    https://github.com/yoonsikp/macOS-KVM-PCI-Passthrough

  • VirGL
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    VirGL is definitely an interesting project, but all one has to do to get GPU passthrough working (from a Linux QEMU host to any guest OS) is: 1.) research a cheap, secondary GPU that is natively supported by the guest OS, 2.) plug such a secondary GPU into a PCIe slot on the host and hook it up to the primary monitor with a secondary cable (D-Sub vs. DVI, etc.), 3.) setup Linux to ignore the secondary GPU at boot and configure a QEMU VM for the GPU passthrough. The whole process takes perhaps one or two hours and as works flawlessly, with no stability issues. (Switching across the two GPU cables can be accomplished in software by using Display Data Channel /DDC/ utilities and switching keyboard/mouse can be accomplished by using evdev /event device/ passthrough.) More information: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM/blob/master/notes.md#gpu-p...
  • Mac OS Kvm Icloud
    1 project | /r/hackintosh | 9 Aug 2023
    I get "verification failed" error when using https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
  • What are the current best methods for virtualizing MacOS on Linux?
    2 projects | /r/linux | 21 Jul 2023
    I also see there is KVM-OSX which looks to be actively maintained, but I haven't heard anything about it.
  • Lima: A nice way to run Linux VMs on Mac
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jul 2023
    You can use qemu/libvirt/kvm on any Linux host to run macOS pretty easily these days[1]. I run Ventura on unraid with nvidea gpu passthrough and it’s been fairly painless.

    You can also run macOS in docker, but it’s ultimately running through qemu/kvm as well[2]

    1. https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

    2. https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX

  • Gnome browser instead of Safari
    1 project | /r/gnome | 24 Jun 2023
    I think this could be of some use to you https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
  • I achieved to run a macOS VM on the Steam Deck in SteamOS desktop mode
    1 project | /r/SteamDeck | 8 Jun 2023
    i cloned that repository

What are some alternatives?

When comparing LookingGlass and OSX-KVM you can also consider the following projects:

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

macOS-Simple-KVM - Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM.

barrier - Open-source KVM software

sosumi-snap

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

OpenCore-Install-Guide - Repo for the OpenCore Install Guide

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

macOS-KVM - Streamlined macOS QEMU KVM Hackintosh configuration using OpenCore and libvirt

QtScrcpy - Android real-time display control software

OSX_GVT-D - Guide to pass iGPU to MacOS KVM guest.

nyxt - Nyxt - the hacker's browser.

Single-GPU-Passthrough