The highly anticipated headless VFIO package, Looking Glass, was released early tonight at 4:30 PM PST. Originally set for a Thursday, December 14 release date. The creator, Geoffrey McRae, decided to “Give everyone a little surprise” and push the 251 commits to GitHub a few hours early. Included in the repository is code for both the client and server sides of the program, all licensed under GPLv2, as promised.
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New Optics on VFIO
Looking Glass is software that helps you copy the framebuffer from a Windows guest to a Linux host. This means you can see the display of the Windows guest on the Linux host, in a window. Looking Glass also provides an interface for the Spice protocol to handle input forwarding to a Windows guest operating system. This allows you to play windows games nearly seamlessly on your Linux desktop.
For those who don’t want to build the Windows binary, Geoff has provided a precompiled binary, available below. The Linux client, however, is provided in source form only. The GitHub repository can be found here.
Building Looking Glass
To build the looking glass client, you’ll need the following dependencies:
- SDL2-devel
- SDL2-ttf-devel
- openssl-devel
- spice-protocol
- fontconfig-devel
- libx11-devel
- gnu-free-mono-fonts
- ivshmem-tools
Once you have the dependencies installed, cd into the directory you checked out to and cd to “client.” Once you’re in that directory, you can simply run “make” to build the binaries. Once complete, you should have the file “looking-glass-client” in the bin directory. Run this to execute the package.
If you need additional help setting up Looking Glass, please refer to the quick-start guide, found here.
Geoffrey McRae is the man behind the Ryzen NPT patch, the GTX 600 series Quadro hack, and XBMC’s (now Kodi) AudioEngine.
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