02 - How Looking Glass works and why it was invented

I came here looking for BGP looking glass... and I found gold

Excellent explanation. I haven't been able to try this out for myself. I am waiting for it to leave alpha and become a little more mature/accessible so I've been keeping my eyes on the development. I first came across this through Level 1 as was the case with many. My interest in it wasn't actually primarily for gaming but was instead for content creation purposes. It was over 10 years ago now that I left computer security where I was familiar working in debian Linux and then got into multimedia design and production where I was forced back into Windows to work with industry applications. Looking Glass excites me because it provides the best of both worlds. I'm also very concerned about the direction the Windows OS has been heading in with all these new "features" being added and privacy/control being taken away from the user. It sure would be nice to be able to get back into Linux and still use my Windows apps taking full advantage of my hardware! Thanks again for the videos and keep up the great work!

This was a great and very informative video! You've done a great job explaining a very niche technological piece. Well done!

Awesome video and explanation thank you for all the hard work!!

This is awesome! Great work!!

Thanks Geoff, for this awesome initiative.

This is just amazing! well done!

Good job, nice presentation!

1) Wow. That's exactly what was needed. 2) Bravo. Seems like the best way to do it. 3) Thank you! Thanks for doing it!

While watching your video Windows 10 auto updated and restarted.

This is just brilliant! I would really like to make it work for me. My laptop supports IOMMU but the problem is that my nVidia card is just a 3D controller which not connected directly to any port and the display is handeled by the integrated graphic card (MUXless setup). I have been searching for a while but I have found that passing through integrated graphic card is hard to achieve and there is not alot of tutorials about it. Do you think that it is possible to say only pass through the portless 3d controller to the virtual machine and render the output using looking glass on the host machine with the integrated card? Or is it actually possible to passthrough both of them to the virtual machine since I'm totally fine with the host machine being headless.

Great work. What about the sound passthrough? Do you pass the sound in the same buffer or is it latency sensitive to work with looking glass?

Exciting stuff! I'm looking to build a minimal viewer (i.e. client) and the last thing I would want for it is X. What are you using in the video, is it X or maybe just some frame buffer stuff?

Hello @gnif congrats on the great project, it certainly has gone a long way. I'm currently researching what is the best way to play some games that don't run on Linux and came through some guides for GPU passthrough and also your videos. I have a question though, I'm I understanding correctly that Looking Glass handles mouse and keyboard inputs from the host to the VM without additional fiddling ? I'm asking because before this video I thought that the only option is to either have a separate mouse and keyboard to pass through the VM or use a software solution like Synergy which will send the inputs from one host to another through the network at the cost of some latency and glitches.

Looking glass is a software engineering marvel. Used it personally for years now.

This was really interesting, I've been looking for exactly this as part of a home lab/ self-hosted environment that I'm interested in re-architecting. My evil plan is to go hyperconverged (due to budget), using KVM + CEPH on top of Linux. The intent is for the underlying host hardware and OS to basically identical, providing the block storage, and acting as VM and container hosts. On one of them though, I need both Windows and Linux VM's to support some different CAD+CAM software. The hang up was what do about GPU's, but this might be an answer, so I can punch GPU output through to both the Linux and Windows VM's (and still use it locally for the host OS as an emergency video output if needed....that wouldn't be critical, would be nice to have as a last resort). Whilst AMD MxGPU or Nvidia Grid would probably be ideal solutions, they're way out of my price range unfortunately. But this strikes me as some pretty cool stuff you have put together, I look forward to investigating it further!

Hey Jeff, thanks a loooooooot for this video. I would like to learn more about your setup, eg. what Linux is your Host system exactly and what are the general requirements for a decent host machine, etc... Can you point me to a place to gather this information? The video is awesome man. And always remember: don't feed the trolls. There seem to be around some in the comment section xD

Nice videos, keep it up!

this is such an awesome project

Great software but I'm curious about one thing, what is exactly the difference between Looking Glass and a software like Synergy/Barrier? Which one is preferable if you have an external monitor that you can dedicate to guest and want smooth transition between monitors?