Using Looking Glass on Universal Blue

General
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READ FIRST

Looking-Glass is a very experimental project and is not ready for production use!
This means there are no official packages for looking-glass-client yet.

For this reason we do not package or ship looking-glass-client, we only provide a working configuration and SELinux rules so that it can be used in Bazzite, Bluefin and Aurora.
We do however package the kvmfr kernel module and include it with the system image, as such file any issue with the kvmfr module in bazzite or bluefin/aurora to our discord or github issue tracker and add @HikariKnight in the issue.

We will only tell you to file an issue with LookingGlass directly if the issue is not related to the packaging and configuration of the kvmfr module.

Enabling the kvmfr module

You can enable the kvmfr module by running the command based on if you are using bazzite or bluefin/aurora

Bazzite:

ujust setup-virtualization kvmfr

Bluefin-dx/Aurora-dx:

ujust configure-vfio kvmfr

Change the static_size_mb of kvmfr by editing /etc/modprobe.d/kvmfr.conf
by default it is set to 128mb, this is enough for 4K SDR.

Compiling Looking-Glass client

  1. Create a fedora:latest distrobox that we will use to compile the binary, use the following command to make the container, when asked about what image to use, select the default one as i have verified this guide works with that image for building.
    This distrobox has to be made manually without the --nvidia flag which our ujust automatically applies to enable hardware acceleration, however we explicitly do not want it in order to make cmake-data successfully install.
    NOTE: If you are not using the latest fedora version, please change latest to match your version number, this is to avoid dependency versioning issues.
distrobox create -i "fedora:latest" -n "tmp-lookingglass"

If you want to use a separate home folder for this then make a folder to contain this containers home folder and run this command instead

distrobox create -i "fedora:latest" -n "tmp-lookingglass" -H "/path/to/new/home"
  1. Enter the container with distrobox enter tmp-lookingglass
  2. Follow upstream documentation, you can find the fedora build dependencies here and you will also want to install the dependencies mentioned for PipeWire Users.
    Since we will be building for Wayland and not X11 you will also need the package libdecor-devel
  3. When you get to the part for running cmake you can(and should on bazzite at least) use the command
cmake -DENABLE_WAYLAND=1 -DENABLE_X11=0 -DENABLE_PULSEAUDIO=0 -DENABLE_PIPEWIRE=1 ..
  1. The above command will disable X11 support and Pulseaudio support, but enable pipewire and wayland support, this will avoid any issues as we do not ship the X11 dependencies for looking-glass.
  2. Copy the built looking-glass-client binary to /run/host/home/$USER/.local/bin/
    You can do that using the following commands if you followed the looking-glass documentation.
mkdir /run/host/home/$USER/.local/bin
cp ./looking-glass-client /run/host/home/$USER/.local/bin/
  1. Test and see if looking-glass-client binary works for you on the host with your VM running.
  2. Exit the container and run the below command to remove the container we used to build the looking-glass client.
distrobox stop tmp_lookingglass ; distrobox rm tmp_lookingglass
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2

Thank you for this guide!

Is it possible to use Looking-Glass in Bluefin-DX? From what I see, the only thing extra is some SELinux rules?

…we only provide a working configuration and SELinux rules so that it can be used in Bazzite.

Hopefully there is there an RPM I can layer in Bluefin-DX to get these SELinux configs? And after that I can simply try following these instructions?

3

this is already in bluefin-dx as they did not want users to layer virt-manager on the non-dx image, the ujust will add the SELinux rules and even give you a human readable copy of them in .config/selinux_te :slight_smile:

ujust configure-vfio on bluefin-dx

guide for compiling looking-glass is still the same as in bazzite though (just make sure you compile it using a fedora:39 container if you are using bluefin-dx:gts or bluefin-dx:39 as of writing)

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