Installation

libvirt/QEMU configuration

This article assumes you already have a fully functional libvirt domain with PCI passthrough working.

If you use virt-manager, this guide also applies to you, since virt-manager uses libvirt as its back-end.

IVSHMEM

Configuration

Note

If your host GPU is either AMD or Intel it is better to set this up using the KVMFR kernel module as this will allow you to make use of DMA transfers to offload some of the memory transfers to the GPU. See VM->host in Kernel module.

Add the following to your libvirt machine configuration inside the ‘devices’ section by running virsh edit <VM> where <VM> is the name of your virtual machine.

<shmem name='looking-glass'>
  <model type='ivshmem-plain'/>
  <size unit='M'>32</size>
</shmem>

Note

If you are using QEMU directly without libvirt the following arguments are required instead.

Add the following to the commands to your QEMU command line, adjusting the bus parameter to suit your particular configuration:

-device ivshmem-plain,memdev=ivshmem,bus=pcie.0 \
-object memory-backend-file,id=ivshmem,share=on,mem-path=/dev/shm/looking-glass,size=32M

The memory size (show as 32 in the example above) may need to be adjusted as per the Determining memory section.

Warning

If you change the size of this after starting your virtual machine you may need to remove the file /dev/shm/looking-glass to allow QEMU to re-create it with the correct size. If you do this the permissions of the file may be incorrect for your user to be able to access it and you will need to correct this. See Permissions

Determining memory

You will need to adjust the memory size to be suitable for your desired maximum resolution, with the following formula:

width x height x pixel size x 2 = frame bytes

frame bytes / 1024 / 1024 = frame megabytes

frame megabytes + 10 MiB = total megabytes

Where pixel size is 4 for 32-bit RGB (SDR) or 8 for 64-bit (HDR *).

Failure to do so will cause Looking Glass to truncate the bottom of the screen and will trigger a message popup to inform you of the size you need to increase the value to.

For example, for a resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p):

1920 x 1080 x 4 x 2 = 16,588,800 bytes

16,588,800 / 1024 / 1024 = 15.82 MiB

15.82 MiB + 10 MiB = 25.82 MiB

You must round this value up to the nearest power of two, which for the provided example is 32 MiB.

Note

Increasing this value beyond what you need does not yield any performance improvements, it simply will block access to that RAM making it unusable by your system.

Common Values

Resolution

Standard Dynamic Range

High Dynamic Range (HDR) *

1920x1080 (1080p)

32

64

1920x1200 (1200p)

32

64

1920x1440 (1440p)

32

64

3840x2160 (2160p/4K)

128

256

Warning

While Looking Glass can capture and display HDR, at the time of writing neither Xorg or Wayland can make use of it and it will be converted by the GPU drivers/hardware to SDR. Additionally using HDR doubles the amount of memory, bandwidth, and CPU load and should generally not be used unless you have a special reason to do so.

Permissions

The shared memory file used by IVSHMEM is found in /dev/shm/looking-glass. By default, it is owned by QEMU, and does not give read/write permissions to your user, which are required for Looking Glass to run properly.

You can use systemd-tmpfiles to create the file before running your VM, granting the necessary permissions which allow Looking Glass to use the file properly.

Create a new file /etc/tmpfiles.d/10-looking-glass.conf, and populate it with the following:

# Type Path               Mode UID  GID Age Argument

f /dev/shm/looking-glass 0660 user kvm -

Change UID to the user name you will run Looking Glass with, usually your own.

Keyboard/mouse/display/audio

Looking Glass makes use of the SPICE protocol to provide keyboard and mouse input, audio input and output, and display fallback.

Note

The default configuration that libvirt uses is not optimal and must be adjusted. Failure to perform these changes will cause input issues along with failure to support 5 button mice.

If you would like to use SPICE to give you keyboard and mouse input along with clipboard sync support, make sure you have a <graphics type='spice'> device, then:

  • Find your <video> device, and set <model type='vga'/>

    • If you can’t find it, make sure you have a <graphics> device, save and edit again.

  • Remove the <input type='tablet'/> device, if you have one.

  • Create an <input type='mouse' bus='virtio'/> device, if you don’t already have one.

  • Create an <input type='keyboard' bus='virtio'/> device to improve keyboard usage.

Note

Be sure to install the the vioinput driver from virtio-win in the guest

To enable audio support add a standard Intel HDA audio device to your configuration as per below:

<sound model='ich9'>
  <audio id='1'/>
</sound>
<audio id='1' type='spice'/>

If you also want clipboard synchronization please see Clipboard synchronization

Clipboard synchronization

Looking Glass can synchronize the clipboard between the host and guest using the SPICE guest agent.

1. Install the SPICE guest tools from https://www.spice-space.org/download.html#windows-binaries.

  1. Configure your VM to enable the SPICE guest agent:

  • QEMU

-device virtio-serial-pci \
-chardev spicevmc,id=vdagent,name=vdagent \
-device virtserialport,chardev=vdagent,name=com.redhat.spice.0
  • libvirt

<channel type="spicevmc">
  <target type="virtio" name="com.redhat.spice.0"/>
  <address type="virtio-serial" controller="0" bus="0" port="1"/>
</channel>
<!-- No need to add a VirtIO Serial device, it will be added automatically -->

AppArmor

For libvirt versions before 5.10.0, if you are using AppArmor, you need to add permissions for QEMU to access the shared memory file. This can be done by adding the following to /etc/apparmor.d/local/abstractions/libvirt-qemu:

/dev/shm/looking-glass rw,

then, restart AppArmor.

sudo systemctl restart apparmor

Memballoon

The VirtIO memballoon device enables the host to dynamically reclaim memory from your VM by growing the balloon inside the guest, reserving reclaimed memory. Libvirt adds this device to guests by default.

However, this device causes major performance issues with VFIO passthrough setups, and should be disabled.

Find the <memballoon> tag and set its type to none:

<memballoon model="none"/>

Additional tuning

Looking Glass is latency sensitive and as such it may suffer microstutters if you have not properly tuned your virtual machine. The physical display output of your GPU will usually not show such issues due to the nature of the hardware but be sure that if you are experiencing issues the following tuning is required to obtain optimal performance.

  1. Do not assign all your CPU cores to your guest VM, you must at minimum reserve two CPU cores (4 threads) for your host system to use. For example, if you have a 6 core CPU, only assign 4 cores (8 threads) to the guest.

  2. Ensure you correctly pin your VMs vCPU threads to the correct cores for your CPU architecture.

  3. If you are on a NUMA architecture (dual CPU, or early Threadripper) be sure that you pin the vCPU threads to the physical CPU/die attached to your GPU.

  4. Just because your GPU is in a slot that is physically x16 in size, does not mean your GPU is running at x16, this is dependent on how your motherboard is physically wired and the physical slot may be limited to x4 or x8.

  5. Be sure to set your CPU model type to host-passthrough so that your guest operating system is aware of the acceleration features of your CPU and can make full use of them.

  6. AMD users be sure that you have the CPU feature flag topoext enabled or your guest operating system will not be aware of which CPU cores are hyper-thread pairs.

  7. NVIDIA users may want to enable NvFBC as an alternative capture API in the guest. Note that NvFBC is officially available on professional cards only and methods to enable NvFBC on non-supported GPUs is against the NVIDIA Capture API SDK License Agreement even though GeForce Experience and Steam make use of it on any NVIDIA GPU.

How to perform these changes is left as an exercise to the reader.

Host application

The Looking Glass Host application captures frames from the guest OS using a capture API, and sends them to the client—be it on the host OS (hypervisor) or another Virtual Machine—through a low-latency transfer protocol over shared memory.

You can get the host program in two ways:

For Linux

While the host application can be compiled and is somewhat functional for Linux it is currently considered incomplete and not ready for usage. As such use at your own risk and do not ask for support.

For OSX

Currently there is no support or plans for support for OSX due to technical limitations.

For Windows

To begin, you must first run the Windows VM with the changes noted above in either the libvirt/QEMU configuration section.

Installing the IVSHMEM driver

Since B6 the host installer available on the official Looking Glass website comes with the IVSHMEM driver and will install this for you. If you are running an older version of Looking Glass please refer to the documentation for your version.

Installing the Looking Glass service

After installing your IVSHMEM driver, we can now install the Looking Glass Host onto our Windows Virtual Machine.

  1. First, run looking-glass-host-setup.exe as an administrator (Why?)

  2. You will be greeted by an intro screen. Press Next to continue.

  3. You are presented with the GPLv2 license. Please read and agree to the license by pressing Agree.

  4. You can change the install path if you wish, otherwise press Next to continue.

  5. You may enable or disable options on this screen to configure the installation. The default values are recommended for most users. Press Install to begin installation.

  6. After a few moments, installation will complete, and you will have a running instance of Looking Glass. If you experience failures, you can see them in the install log appearing in the middle of the window.

  7. Press Close to exit the installer.

Command line users can run looking-glass-host-setup.exe /S to execute a silent install with default options selected. Further configuration from the command line can be done with flags. You can list all available flags by running looking-glass-host-setup.exe /?.

Client application

The Looking Glass client receives frames from the host to display on your screen. It also handles input, and can optionally share the system clipboard with your guest OS through SPICE.

First you must build the client from source, see Building. Once you have built the client, you can install it. Run the following as root:

make install

To install for the local user only, run:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/.local .. && make install