[winswitch] Using xpra with steam and amd64gpu on linux

[Christopher Faylor]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 04:55:18PM +0700, Antoine Martin via shifter-users wrote:
>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.

Thanks.  I'm not sure it's worth the effort though.

>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

Thanks again! I missed this in my many hours of googling.

>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

I don't *think* that this would be an issue for my particular use case
since I'm not going to be actually actively playing the game.  I won't
bore you with details about what I need this for though.  :-)

Thanks for the, as always, timely insight.

cgf