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Comment by uberduper | Hacker News Reader

I'm familiar with linux virtualization, gpu passthrough, etc. I've never heard of arcd and they've made no attempt in this doc or on their git to explain what it is or why it exists as, I assume, a replacement (or wrapper?) for qemu.

My past experience with looking-glass is that it falls on its face at anything > 1440p@60Hz. I'm interested in vGPU for my linux VMs (spice is slow and sdl/gtk display is flakey) but for gaming, I don't want looking-glass and prefer to just do the passthrough thing with a KVM switch.

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We are still trying to make the documentation better. We're actually hiring right now so if you can recommend someone who might be able to help with that I'd love to talk to them. :)

Also looking-glass is an option under introspection: in the yaml. You can use whatever type of virtual display you like best. We chose looking glass as the default because in our testing it was the most performant.

arcd is actually the part of the program that you call in your shell to use our library's functions. Arc Compute is the name of our company so arcd seemed like a reasonable name. We also considered calling it vfd but so far we've settled on arcd.

Yea what / where is arcd? is that a closed source portion of this stack that this depends upon? not super clear what is really open source about this stuff -- this looks like a pile of scripts to run arcd?

edit: ok thanks so its qemu-system-x86_64

Have you guys tried to run something like android in the vm on an arm host? or what are the limitations there?

All the source code for arcd is here: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/libvf.io/tree/master/src

> sdl/gtk display is flakey

How is it compared to spice/qxl - does it have some advantages?

In my case with 4k monitors and virgl, it's substantially faster and a desktop env feels native. Spice feels quite laggy to me.

The downside is that the sdl or gtk interface is coupled to the running vm and if they crash, the vm goes too. And in my experience, they crash a lot. I've been unable to get a two monitor setup working with either the sdl or gtk display but it works fine via spice.

I'd like to try this combination sdl+virgl that is better than spice, how do I force it on qemu? Like this?

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/08/28/virg...

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