The universe does seem rather badly designed these days

Different devices. iOS, android, AppleTV. Most of it is likely Apple’s fault for the limited options in the ecosystem tho.

It’s not a transcoding power issue. It’s a UI consistency and usability issue. With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.

I still don’t use Plex and exclusively use Jellyfin, but it’s still a hard sell to non technical users. Plex has much more polish.

It is……if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.

Yes. Your machines would have one main IP address, and one virtual IP address that would be assigned to either machine depending on the priority or health check status. That IP can be on the same physical interface, or a separate one. It’s very flexible, pretty standard config for high availability setups.

Keepalived to set up a floating IP between two proxy hosts. The VIP is where the traffic points to, the two hosts act as active/passive HA.

I think the universal consensus is that outside of a very specific use case: multiple VDI desktops that share the same image, ZFS dedupe is completely useless at best and will destroy your dataset at worst by causing to be unmountable on any system that has less RAM than needed. In every other use case, the savings are not worth the trouble.

Even in the VDI use case, unless you have MANY copies of said disk images(like 5+ copies of each), it’s still not worth the increase in system resources needed to use ZFS dedupe.

It’s one of those “oooh shiny” nice features that everyone wants to use, but will regret it nearly every time.

I’ve always found the documentation around virtio-GPU and virtgl very lacking, and have never gotten them working. Would love to get pointers if anyone has a good source.

I don’t see any performance differences with the vgpu actually. I have more performance bottlenecks with the CPU, and my RAM isn’t the fastest, so I think I’m more CPU limited. Benchmarks I have run that are GPU focused seem to show little to no difference from what the physical card would do.

Yeah unfortunately. 20xx is last generation supported so far via the patch, not sure if support for later cards is coming or not.

No, but I think you’d have some problems. Only the host has access to the actual DisplayPort outputs, all the vgpus have virtual displays, I don’t think there’s a way to make them use the physical out.

Sure, but you’ll get diminishing returns most likely as consumer hardware doesn’t really have the resources to scale that way very well if all the VMs are running demanding apps simultaneously.

Even for something like 4 VMs that just do NVenc, there are limits for how many streams the GPU can do. I think there’s another patch that lets you raise that, but at some point you’ll run out of resources quick. Even powerful consumer gear isn’t really designed to be used by more than one user/app and it starts to show the more you virtualize and split those resources.

I’ve been doing exactly that at home for a couple years now. First with Parsec, now Sunshine/Moonlight.

Host is Proxmox on Ryzen 5800x, 64gm RAM GPU is 2070 Super, with VGPU patched drivers from https://gitlab.com/polloloco/vgpu-proxmox

When I’m gaming I’ll dedicate the full 8Gb to my windows Vm, otherwise I split it in 2 or 4Gb chunks to Jellyfin or my home camera monitoring. 8gb can’t split very many ways, and most things require at least 2 to run.

Locally at home I can run 1440p 60fps rock solid over wifi on any device, from my phone/old laptop/apple tv/raspberry pi. Remote I can do 1080p60, but a bit more hit or miss depending on my network connection.

Experimenting with LLMs I’ve done through the same windows VM, or to a ubuntu dev VM. Works the same way. I’m thinking of transitioning my gaming VM to Linux too.

The amount of VRAM is the hard limitation to get past, the virtualization tech itself has been there for a while.

But to be perfectly honest……it really was just a “let’s see if I could do this” type task, direct GPU pass though is more straightforward and it’s not really worth splitting 8Gb these days. Unless you get a card with significantly more VRAM passthrough is much less work.

Reminds me of OS/2

Seriously we did this in 1998, why this again??

In most games not noticeable. Only game I have trouble with is emulating Wii, playing Mario Galaxy. The pointer on screen lags, but I think that’s more due to the bluetooth adapter compatibility than any latency added by the usb-> ip -> wifi link.

I’m not an FPS player, so can’t speak to sub second latency….but I do racing sims on this, and it has no trouble with controls and force feedback.

In the house, anywhere with wifi. Can run decently down to 10-15mbps at 1080p60.

Remotely, over Tailscale, my home uplink is too slow for anything more than 720p60, but its low latency enough I can play games like Mario RPG and get timed hits correct. Or Clone Hero. Games like rocket league tend to be too fast tho, and video breaks up badly.

so Long as you have fast enough uplink, I think I’d be fine anywhere. Sunshine and moonlight are amazing, I used to use Parsec extensively but now it’s just moonlight and sunshine.

Works great. It’s my portable gaming box. I use virtualhere usb over ip on the same Pi too so I can use multiple controllers like a wheel or joystick, pass a full bluetooth adapter directly to it for emulators.

You keep the user-changeable files on a separate filesystem. Whether that’s just a separate partition, or an external disk. Keep the system itself read only, and write-heavy directories like logs and caches in RAM.

Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!