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Comment by gnif | Hacker News Reader

If you want easy, this is not for you. Setting up LG first requires setting up a VFIO Virtual Machine.

As for how viable it is, very... we have many members in our community that are using LG for productivity applications. For performance, very close to bare metal. In applications like Photoshop and Office you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

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I used to use looking glass (still sponsoring the project) but since my hardware is ancient I tried running the windows VM of a DVI to my monitor instead, and it's been so incredibly smooth along with Barrier ever since, with more horsepower I would probably go back to LG because of the convenience of being a regular window I can manage however I want.

This? https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Is the key feature clipboard sharing? Otherwise I don't know why I wouldn't redirect events with zero additional software. As-is, I press both ctrl keys and my keyboard and mouse switch to the virtual machine. The big nuisance is that I need to switch monitor inputs. That appears to be something I can automate, but simply haven't yet.

Yes that, I don't know how you manage the kb and mouse without it, but I only use it for that.

No, it's not. evdev forces you to have your keyboard/mouse either fully captured or not, which is a pain if you're just working with a productivity suite. With LG's SPICE client input is sent to the VM via the same channel that evdev does, but also gives greater control allowing us to keep the cursor in sync with the local cursor, making the VM feel as if it's just another application on your desktop.

> If you want easy, this is not for you. Setting up LG first requires setting up a VFIO Virtual Machine.

Any quick links to how that differs from a regular QEMU/KVM setup?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

Thanks.

So if I’m already UEFI booting my VMs with dedicated volumes, the key difference is how GPU pass-through is done?

Pretty much, lots of factors that are hardware dependent, such as how your motherboard assigns IOMMU groups come into play.

You can also pass through more than just a GPU. I pass through an NVMe disk and a USB controller, effectively giving me a full second computer within my workstation. It's honestly fantastic.

Ok. And I assume that’ll all work at PCI speeds making it much more performant than using virtio-based forwarding. Sounds neat.

Do I need to do anything besides UEFI boot my virt-manager (QEMU) VM to make use of things like this?

I generally followed this guide, despite working from another distro: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

The biggest pain every time I've done this is making sure that I can bind the device to the vfio driver.

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