vfio VS Sunshine

If you love wasting time you could give my script a shot as well from a terminal with your gpu as the -pci argument, but you'll also want to give it your USB controllers too.

In my script I have -name main,debug-threads=on in my qemu command which helps me find which child thread is the iothread. I do my pinning using the same debug thread name discovery method.

Yeah my script is public and can be found here. I've thought about making an actual link post here a few times in the past but I guess the time to do so never really came up.

These boot arguments allow me to give my VM cores 3,11 to my guest while my host continues to operate (and handle any IOThreads I may have running for the guest) on the remaining cores 0(thread0,12), core1(thread1,13) and core3 (thread2,14). Personally, I handle my pinning dynamically with a bash script I wrote and still today find myself adding features and making improvements to. It can be found here if you want to give it a shot for your use case.

How does this compare to /u/ipaqmaster's script which accepts one-liners for single or dual and you're set?

You'll get further posting here by detailing what exactly is going wrong when you try and any configuration and scripts you tried to do it with. There are also scripts which try to be the everyman and do it all for you such as this vfio bash script written by one of the members here.

You may wish to try my vfio script which handles all of that automatically. Could be worth a try.

I've missed no opportunity to plug it lately, but the slew of people using hardcoded scripts copy-pasted from some guide or youtube video has never felt right to me. I made my own dynamic script which handles most vfio problems on the fly rather than hardcoding start.sh/stop.sh scripts per configuration. It could be worth checking out given I made it for Archlinux (my desktop) and you seem to be running that too.

I use this script to help start the qemu VM (there were no recent changes to the script) (I can paste the full qemu_system_x86_64 command if that would help) https://github.com/ipaqmaster/vfio

Well, if you'd be willing to give it a test drive just for fun I made and use this for my daily VFIO ease of access if you'd want to give it a try.

> Would the Swift UI also work on an iPad?

Yes, but probably not for the first version.

> Do you have any comparisons with other tools (eg steam streaming, moonlight)

Steam streaming just doesn't really work on linux. Moonlight is somewhat similar in terms of direction, and has an established client base. I know of at least two projects to build servers for the Moonlight protocol[1][2].

The Moonlight protocol is a bit weird, because it's an open-source reverse engineering of a dead NVIDIA project, GeForce now. There are fundamental limitations to the protocol, for example that the cursor must be rendered in-stream or simulated. Using my tool, the cursor is rendered locally, and custom cursor images can actually be pushed to the client, for a seamless experience. This sounds like a minor detail but it matters a lot for subjective latency. I'm also working on employing tricks like hierarchical coding using FEC in the protocol, because I hate VBR encoding for games (it makes text blurry and breaks immersion). Those tricks aren't really possible in Moonlight.

All of the Linux solutions I know about have significantly higher latency compared to Magic Mirror, although I don't have numbers for exactly how much higher. (I have a benchmark to test the latency of my tool, but the others don't.) I'd encourage you to try them out and get a feel for the difference.

Finally, I think Magic Mirror is the easiest to install and get going on the server. It has almost zero runtime library or service dependencies (there's a pesky dynamic link against libxkbcommon which I haven't managed to remove), so you don't need to mess with pipewire or docker or anything - it's completely self-contained.

All that said, the existing tools have the advantage of a larger user and contributor base, whereas Magic Mirror is just me on a mission so far :) So they're likely to be much more stable and usable.

[1]: https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine

RDP as a regular or quick solution is actually really decent in this respect.

(1) https://app.lizardbyte.dev/Sunshine

Moonlight + Sunshine for a self hosted solution, works with every OS

server: https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine/

client: https://github.com/moonlight-stream

You could use sunshine (https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine) + moonlight (https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-qt). To be honest, at least for me, it works better than most of the RDP/VNC stuff.

EDIT: Just checked again, original was released early 2020, current maintained project started 2022.

On your pc, install Sunshine. It's an open source moonlight server. There's a good walk through on the sunshine github page. Connect your handheld to the wifi running the server & open moonlight. Should work.

I discovered the moonlight client and sunshine server a few months ago. These are open source solutions to provide remote gaming/desktop capabilities with built in input and audio passthrough. I tried NoMachine, but I wasn't able to get audio to work. This looks like a known issue on arch. On sunshine, I didn't have to do any extra tweaking! This allowed me to game on my desktop pc without having to sit at my desk. This was especially helpful while watching my 2nd son. I was really impressed by the performance, I could stream my host's display at high resolutions and frame rates with low latency despite my desktop being in the basement using WiFi. I was getting some instability with WiFi, so I wanted to try connecting my desktop to the router via Ethernet. I decided to go with a headless solution because that gives me more flexibility on the placement of the desktop; I ended up moving my desktop upstairs closer to my router. I figured out a way to stream my hosts display headless by using Nvidia TwinView to create the virtual display. This means I don't need to buy any HDMI/DP dummy plugs. I wrote a Linux Guide for sunshine on how to set this up. If you have any feedback on this guide, let me know! I haven't tried this, but wolf is an interesting docker alternative to sunshine.