[SOLVED] GPU Passthrough + Ubuntu/Mint Guest + xRDP with hw acceleration

[lixaotec]

Dear folks,

I´ve been strugling to get a proxmox with GPU Passthrough + Ubuntu/Mint Guest + xRDP with hw acceleration

Has anyone done that b4?

The far I got was Ubuntu recognizes gpu and nvidia-smi shows a processor there. Windows guests are ok with hw acceleration.

My system setup is a asrock b450m steel legend + ryzen 5 1600 af + asus gtx 1660 dual evo

I have tried every tips ppl gav on their topics.

Wish someone had accomplish that.

Using xRDP (what i need) seem to get graphics to llvmpipe, and cpu goes high on a simple web browsing.

thank you

 

[Whitterquick]

Is it possible we can get the Proxmox devs to look into PCIe passthrough? I know it’s very complex and hardware dependant but it seems it’s by far the most problematic feature of Proxmox and one that is a topic of daily discussion. It would be good if it was being looked into as a priority for improvement.

 

[lixaotec]

I´m pooling here, because it may be a matter of drivers or linux kernel improvment support...

Agreed with the need of PCIe improvements, reinforce the need for gpu attention, as in a near future a VM without GPU enhacements will be useless.

Just figure out how this subject is not more widely supported/improved, it seems ppl use Windows? (where it works)

Hope I can contrib to get this improved, as I know windows will, perhaps, be very replaced with better GPU support on virtual environments. (not talking about games)

Therefore i seek for someone that may share experience if he/she could accomplish.

Best,

 

[rkk2025]

Hey there,

@lixaotec As you've already found out in https://github.com/neutrinolabs/xrdp/issues/1029, XRDP does not support GPU acceleration without the experimental DRI3/GLAMOR options enabled during compilation.

I'm running XRDP in a LXC container with Hardware Acceleration (Intel i-GPU) and it works relatively well for me.

One thing to note, don't expect miracles from XRDP. RDP is a Proprietary Microsoft protocol, and XRDP is basically a reverse engineering project that lacks many of the features included in Microsofts RDP implementation. Being a big one the missing support for a h264 video channel for smooth playback of multimedia elements and Hardware Video Encoding (RemoteFX is as good as it gets there). XRDP mainly uses the CPU to encode and detect all the screen updates, the experimental DRI3/GLAMOR implementation merely supports running OpenGL based applications with rendering offloaded to the GPU, so don't expect your CPU to be sleeping. Also the experimental DRI3/GLAMOR implementation does not seem to support GPU Video En/Decoding, so all videos running in your browser will be all decoded in CPU.

In essence the Microsoft RDP implementation will be most likely always way faster than XRDP.
So you have an idea, on my own server (UPBoard Squared with an Intel N4200) I have XRDP running in a LXC container (Basically running bare metal) with DRI3/GLAMOR GPU Acceleration enabled and working, and I have a Microsoft Windows 10 Virtual Machine without GPU on the same machine. And even without GPU acceleration on the Windows VM, the Windows VM is much smoother than the XRDP with GPU acceleration.

---
P.D: You can use my GIST to see how to install XRDP with GLAMOR enabled: https://gist.github.com/rkkoszewski/aa531cee7126edf329b76bdd0546f502
(If it works on Ubuntu with Cinnamon(mint), I don't know, you'll have to try it out and install the dependencies that your system needs. Cinnamon itself works for me on Debian with XRDP and GPU acceleration)

 

[lixaotec]

thank you @rkk2025 for sharing your knowledge!

You've got all the points.

finally it is still sad that community hasnt got an alternative for remoting, as good as Microsoft solutions.

Not that is not working, but many features count on that, as you mention in your comments.

I have a great experience on using RDP with Windows even with low specs machines, however linux still wont deliver that, even with all those tricks and great job of glamour drives' people effort.

Hoping to find a such as great remote tool as m$ rdp for linux, as windows for my enterprise env is not affordable for their licensing schemas

thanks!

 

[morph027]

You might want to have a look at https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php

 

[r.jochum]

I'm using NoMachine for that.