[winswitch] Using xpra with steam and amd64gpu on linux

[Antoine Martin]

On 22/07/2019 13:19, Christopher Faylor via shifter-users wrote:
> I recently had an off-the wall idea to use xpra with steam on my local
> machine to achieve some degree of isolation from my normal X-Server.
> I'd like my game (a windows game which works great under steam) to be
> able to work in another workspace without interfering with my normal work.
> Running steam in another workspace somewhat works but there is bleedover
> with mouse events sometimes.  My mouse cursor gets changed and moved
> randomly, which is pretty annoying.
> 
> xpra works really well with virtualgl so I was hoping that I could run
> the game using that to get acceptable levels of performance but, while
> demo things like "/usr/bin/glxsphere" work amazingly well, steam fails
> to run anything due to this error:
> 
> vulkan: No DRI3 support detected - required for presentation
> Note: you can probably enable DRI3 in your Xorg config
> vulkan: No DRI3 support detected - required for presentation
> Note: you can probably enable DRI3 in your Xorg config
> Could not find both graphics and present queues
> 
> I've tried running xpra with a dummy driver via:
> 
> xpra start :100 --xvfb='Xorg -noreset +extension DRI3 +extension GLX +extension RANDR +extension RENDER -config xdummy.conf'
> 
> (xdummy.conf uses the dummy driver).
> 
> but that didn't help and I didn't really expect it to.
> 
> I don't think I'm going to be able to get beyond the DRI3 hurdle but I
> thought I'd ask just in case there is a trick that would get this
> working.
It may be worth asking this question on the Xorg or Steam mailing lists.
They are more likely to know what API steam expects and what virtual
framebuffers like Xvfb or Xdummy are able to provide.

VirtualGL works great for OpenGL acceleration, but if you're game
requires Vulkan then you're probably out of luck as it does not seem
possible to write a VirtualVulkan equivallent at this point:
https://github.com/VirtualGL/virtualgl/issues/37

Even if you did get past this hurdle, there are other challenges for
running games:
* input devices: latency issues, support for devices beyond just mouse
and keyboard
* grabs and screen resizing
etc
Not impossible, but certainly challenging.

Cheers,
Antoine
> 
> cgf