8 ms·

3D support for X11 guests

99 points by eshizhan 9y ago

harrygeez 9y ago
I tried running Arch Linux on both VirtualBox and VMware Player on my Windows machine at work and Compton's performance is terrible. It's strange because it runs so well on VMware Fusion on my MacBook. Can someone recommend a better way to virtualize Linux desktop with composition in Windows?
- robinduckett 9y ago
  Use VMWare workstation?
  - wila 9y ago
    Nah, VMware Player and VMware Workstation use the exact same engine. If you are having performance problems with VMware Player and are using either AVG of Avast antivirus then the problem might be the antivirus. See also [0] [0] https://communities.vmware.com/thread/553759 https://communities.vmware.com/thread/553759
    - i336_ 9y ago
      I was very curious so I read through that thread. One person found that turning Avast's Behavior Shield off helped. But with AVG... wow. AVG ships with a disabled-by-default "Use HW assisted virtualization" option buried in its settings. As in, install AVG and it turns that off systemwide until you turn it back on. Yay!
eshizhan 9y ago
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14102#comment:42 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14102#comment:42 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11574 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11574
tcrews 9y ago
Never worked well and we turn it off in our Vagrant boxes. If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).
- scw 9y ago
  For the Vagrant VMWare support, are you using the official (paid) Vagrant provider or something else? I've been interested in hearing about experiences of using it.
- bhouston 9y ago
  We switched to lxc for vagrant, it is a amazing both for GPU support, speed of startup, and low memory usage. Would never go back to running full VMs via VB or VMware. You could wait years for some 3D support in VB, or you could just side step the problem and go with lxc.
  - sandGorgon 9y ago
    Could you talk about how do you set this up (and how you use it) ? I'm assuming that this is LiNux only.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Same. These days, I usually use my Linux system in a Windows host with raw-disk passthrough and VirtualBox. I've tinkered with the 3D acceleration but all it's done is break things for me. My experiments with VMWare show that while it does well on some things that VBox struggles with, it has its own areas of weakness/slowness, essentially making it a wash. When I redo my system in the next few months, I plan on doing a Xen setup with GPU passthrough to Windows and then using Linux in parallel instead of hosted out of VBox.
hamburglar 9y ago
I don't understand how this is a "dilemma." It's like saying, "on one hand, I really need to mow my lawn. On the other hand, I really don't want to. It's a real dilemma!"
- dreamlayers 9y ago
  Trolling people in an attempt to get their lawn mowed by others.
- ChristianBundy 9y ago
  I think it's more akin to a free lawn mowing service that's having trouble cutting new types of grass. It's like saying "On one hand, we really want to cut your grass for free. On the other hand, cutting new types of grass takes a significant amount of time that we don't have." I get that it's really nice to have your cake and eat it too, but unless you're paying for said-cake I'm not sure that your critique is very accurate.
  - hamburglar 9y ago
    Don't get me wrong; I'm not demanding they fix this bug. They don't have the resources to prioritize it, and hey, that's their prerogative. It's a free product, after all. I just think calling it a dilemma is weird and makes it sound like there's some counter-argument to fixing the problem beyond "we don't have time."
- simonh 9y ago
  They mow the grass on a park that's open to us all to use, but they don't have time to mow that bit over there. They're just asking if anyone else has time to do it instead.
bhouston 9y ago
Switch from vb to lxc/docker and you get great GPU driver support, even CUDA.
- nine_k 9y ago
  ... As long as you're running the same OS. Consider OS X and Windows hosts.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Completely different thing. Vb is VMs, lxc is containers
- ansible 9y ago
  Really? I was at one point trying to get GPU passthrough working with LXC and I could never get programs to actually run. Ubuntu 16.04, CUDA 7.5 or maybe 8.0, and a cheap GTX 730. Maybe I'll have to try again. I was also trying this so that I could run my desktop environment in a container too.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    There is no passthrough in LXC, because it is containerization, not virtualization. You are running the same kernel and kernel modules for both systems.
    - ansible 9y ago
      Yes, I had installed the Nvidia drivers on both the host system and the container. The CUDA programs run on the host, but didn't inside the container, even after creating the proper device nodes in /dev in the container.
      - vetinari 9y ago
        My guess would be, that the user space driver uses additional mechanism to communicate with the kernel module. I don't thing that it hauls large data buffers via device files; I would try strace to see, where it fails.
hedora 9y ago
Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not? (This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)
- emeraldd 9y ago
  I use Virtualbox daily without ever using a desktop environment in the VM. It's very useful in headless form for development machines when working locally.
  - XorNot 9y ago
    I find this baffling when KVM is much more amenable to being scripted from the command line.
    - BuuQu9hu 9y ago
      Vagrant. Many of us still have and use Vagrant.
      - y4mi 9y ago
        vagrant is completely modular though... i use vagrant with libvirt/qemu at work for nested VMs
        scrollaway 9y ago
        How do you set up a two-way synced directory in Vagrant without virtualbox? IME, you can't.
        logicallee 9y ago
        "can't" is a strong word. why can't you do it in the user space within those VM's, communicating over a network adapter? If you don't care about putting on a raincoat, going outside to the Internet, and launching it up into the cloud, you can just install dropbox and get a sync'd directory without additional work. Obviously this is extra unnecessary overhead, two times, but for your use case you may not care. you can alternatively roll your own solution though it might take you an hour or two. think about rsync over a local network adapter. I realize these are hackish solutions but if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid. on the plus side you will control that traffic. having directory syncing that breaks the VM abstraction opens leaks due to potential oversights in how it's coded. if I were in your predicament I would work around it.
petecox 9y ago
Obvious question, why not just run an X11 server on the host? Perhaps Oracle and Microsoft (WSL) can collaborate on supporting an X11 server (ones already exist) for Windows 10.
- skratlo 9y ago
  Can't you already do that? With DISPLAY variable. Although there could be less overhead in running local (guest) X server and stream only GL commands.
- emeraldd 9y ago
  That would work, but perform like caro. There are a large number of effects that need shared memory tricks to work efficiently in X. So, any "modern" desktop is going to be iffy running that way.
- hedora 9y ago
  For windows, try mobaxterm. I tried a half dozen x11 servers a few years ago, and it was the best by far. It works great, modulo 3d acceleration. If I remember right, cut and paste work well, so that (plus a file share for Downloads) gets rid of the need to run a web browser in Linux. Similarly, it can use the windows wm to manage the x11 windows, so you automatically bypass the linux compositor. [edit: Also, Hyper-V is extremely fast in this type of setup, because they focus on server performance, and this workload looks like any other network/io intensive server]
cpncrunch 9y ago
I finally gave up on virtualbox and bought vmware instead for my mac. It works much better.
justabystander 9y ago
Virtualbox 3D progress has been unfortunately slow for a long time. It was kind of anticipated with Oracle's acquisition, as their laser focus on legal engagements and consulting pushes a lot of technical projects to the back burner. I'd love to see a bit more alignment between VirtualBox and Qemu. Even though KVM and Qemu's virtualized graphics acceleration is still a WIP, having a shared code base could accelerate the project on things like SPICE (https://www.spice-space.org/download.html https://www.spice-space.org/download.html) and Virgl (https://virgil3d.github.io/ https://virgil3d.github.io/). Unfortunately, I think it uses a lot of Linux-specific technologies (e.g. KVM, Gallium), so the likelihood of sharing at that level seems pretty low. Although, supposedly Gallium isn't locked into Windows. Theoretically, if we could agree on a common host-guest interface for a virtual graphics adapter, it could share the guest implementations and host implementations could be added as needed. And it could be reused in multiple projects. But it always seems that this is the tech that never gets sufficient cross-project collaboration. And given the many differences between vendor hardware, a portable interface has been difficult. Maybe Vulkan will provide enough low-level functionality to ease the abstraction?
mrmondo 9y ago
Virtualbox is so far past dead to me, terrible networking issues and performance, dreadfully poor IO performance and oracle to top it off.
eshizhan 9y ago
In some ways, many Linux beginners will choose to use VirtualBox to learn knowledge. If there is no good user experience with graphics hardware acceleration, we may lose many of the open source community supporters.

99 points by eshizhan 9y ago

I tried running Arch Linux on both VirtualBox and VMware Player on my Windows machine at work and Compton's performance is terrible. It's strange because it runs so well on VMware Fusion on my MacBook. Can someone recommend a better way to virtualize Linux desktop with composition in Windows?

robinduckett 9y ago
Use VMWare workstation?
- wila 9y ago
  Nah, VMware Player and VMware Workstation use the exact same engine. If you are having performance problems with VMware Player and are using either AVG of Avast antivirus then the problem might be the antivirus. See also [0] [0] https://communities.vmware.com/thread/553759 https://communities.vmware.com/thread/553759
  - i336_ 9y ago
    I was very curious so I read through that thread. One person found that turning Avast's Behavior Shield off helped. But with AVG... wow. AVG ships with a disabled-by-default "Use HW assisted virtualization" option buried in its settings. As in, install AVG and it turns that off systemwide until you turn it back on. Yay!

eshizhan 9y ago

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14102#comment:42 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14102#comment:42 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11574 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11574

tcrews 9y ago

Never worked well and we turn it off in our Vagrant boxes. If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).

scw 9y ago
For the Vagrant VMWare support, are you using the official (paid) Vagrant provider or something else? I've been interested in hearing about experiences of using it.
bhouston 9y ago
We switched to lxc for vagrant, it is a amazing both for GPU support, speed of startup, and low memory usage. Would never go back to running full VMs via VB or VMware. You could wait years for some 3D support in VB, or you could just side step the problem and go with lxc.
- sandGorgon 9y ago
  Could you talk about how do you set this up (and how you use it) ? I'm assuming that this is LiNux only.
cookiecaper 9y ago
Same. These days, I usually use my Linux system in a Windows host with raw-disk passthrough and VirtualBox. I've tinkered with the 3D acceleration but all it's done is break things for me. My experiments with VMWare show that while it does well on some things that VBox struggles with, it has its own areas of weakness/slowness, essentially making it a wash. When I redo my system in the next few months, I plan on doing a Xen setup with GPU passthrough to Windows and then using Linux in parallel instead of hosted out of VBox.

hamburglar 9y ago

I don't understand how this is a "dilemma." It's like saying, "on one hand, I really need to mow my lawn. On the other hand, I really don't want to. It's a real dilemma!"

dreamlayers 9y ago
Trolling people in an attempt to get their lawn mowed by others.
ChristianBundy 9y ago
I think it's more akin to a free lawn mowing service that's having trouble cutting new types of grass. It's like saying "On one hand, we really want to cut your grass for free. On the other hand, cutting new types of grass takes a significant amount of time that we don't have." I get that it's really nice to have your cake and eat it too, but unless you're paying for said-cake I'm not sure that your critique is very accurate.
- hamburglar 9y ago
  Don't get me wrong; I'm not demanding they fix this bug. They don't have the resources to prioritize it, and hey, that's their prerogative. It's a free product, after all. I just think calling it a dilemma is weird and makes it sound like there's some counter-argument to fixing the problem beyond "we don't have time."
simonh 9y ago
They mow the grass on a park that's open to us all to use, but they don't have time to mow that bit over there. They're just asking if anyone else has time to do it instead.

bhouston 9y ago

Switch from vb to lxc/docker and you get great GPU driver support, even CUDA.

nine_k 9y ago
... As long as you're running the same OS. Consider OS X and Windows hosts.
mynewtb 9y ago
Completely different thing. Vb is VMs, lxc is containers
ansible 9y ago
Really? I was at one point trying to get GPU passthrough working with LXC and I could never get programs to actually run. Ubuntu 16.04, CUDA 7.5 or maybe 8.0, and a cheap GTX 730. Maybe I'll have to try again. I was also trying this so that I could run my desktop environment in a container too.
- vetinari 9y ago
  There is no passthrough in LXC, because it is containerization, not virtualization. You are running the same kernel and kernel modules for both systems.
  - ansible 9y ago
    Yes, I had installed the Nvidia drivers on both the host system and the container. The CUDA programs run on the host, but didn't inside the container, even after creating the proper device nodes in /dev in the container.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      My guess would be, that the user space driver uses additional mechanism to communicate with the kernel module. I don't thing that it hauls large data buffers via device files; I would try strace to see, where it fails.

hedora 9y ago

Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not? (This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)

emeraldd 9y ago
I use Virtualbox daily without ever using a desktop environment in the VM. It's very useful in headless form for development machines when working locally.
- XorNot 9y ago
  I find this baffling when KVM is much more amenable to being scripted from the command line.
  - BuuQu9hu 9y ago
    Vagrant. Many of us still have and use Vagrant.
    - y4mi 9y ago
      vagrant is completely modular though... i use vagrant with libvirt/qemu at work for nested VMs
      - scrollaway 9y ago
        How do you set up a two-way synced directory in Vagrant without virtualbox? IME, you can't.
        logicallee 9y ago
        "can't" is a strong word. why can't you do it in the user space within those VM's, communicating over a network adapter? If you don't care about putting on a raincoat, going outside to the Internet, and launching it up into the cloud, you can just install dropbox and get a sync'd directory without additional work. Obviously this is extra unnecessary overhead, two times, but for your use case you may not care. you can alternatively roll your own solution though it might take you an hour or two. think about rsync over a local network adapter. I realize these are hackish solutions but if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid. on the plus side you will control that traffic. having directory syncing that breaks the VM abstraction opens leaks due to potential oversights in how it's coded. if I were in your predicament I would work around it.

petecox 9y ago

Obvious question, why not just run an X11 server on the host? Perhaps Oracle and Microsoft (WSL) can collaborate on supporting an X11 server (ones already exist) for Windows 10.

skratlo 9y ago
Can't you already do that? With DISPLAY variable. Although there could be less overhead in running local (guest) X server and stream only GL commands.
emeraldd 9y ago
That would work, but perform like caro. There are a large number of effects that need shared memory tricks to work efficiently in X. So, any "modern" desktop is going to be iffy running that way.
hedora 9y ago
For windows, try mobaxterm. I tried a half dozen x11 servers a few years ago, and it was the best by far. It works great, modulo 3d acceleration. If I remember right, cut and paste work well, so that (plus a file share for Downloads) gets rid of the need to run a web browser in Linux. Similarly, it can use the windows wm to manage the x11 windows, so you automatically bypass the linux compositor. [edit: Also, Hyper-V is extremely fast in this type of setup, because they focus on server performance, and this workload looks like any other network/io intensive server]

cpncrunch 9y ago

I finally gave up on virtualbox and bought vmware instead for my mac. It works much better.

justabystander 9y ago

Virtualbox 3D progress has been unfortunately slow for a long time. It was kind of anticipated with Oracle's acquisition, as their laser focus on legal engagements and consulting pushes a lot of technical projects to the back burner. I'd love to see a bit more alignment between VirtualBox and Qemu. Even though KVM and Qemu's virtualized graphics acceleration is still a WIP, having a shared code base could accelerate the project on things like SPICE (https://www.spice-space.org/download.html https://www.spice-space.org/download.html) and Virgl (https://virgil3d.github.io/ https://virgil3d.github.io/). Unfortunately, I think it uses a lot of Linux-specific technologies (e.g. KVM, Gallium), so the likelihood of sharing at that level seems pretty low. Although, supposedly Gallium isn't locked into Windows. Theoretically, if we could agree on a common host-guest interface for a virtual graphics adapter, it could share the guest implementations and host implementations could be added as needed. And it could be reused in multiple projects. But it always seems that this is the tech that never gets sufficient cross-project collaboration. And given the many differences between vendor hardware, a portable interface has been difficult. Maybe Vulkan will provide enough low-level functionality to ease the abstraction?

mrmondo 9y ago

Virtualbox is so far past dead to me, terrible networking issues and performance, dreadfully poor IO performance and oracle to top it off.

eshizhan 9y ago

In some ways, many Linux beginners will choose to use VirtualBox to learn knowledge. If there is no good user experience with graphics hardware acceleration, we may lose many of the open source community supporters.