Hello everyone! 👋

For the past year I had fun messing around with Docker containers, Moonlight/Sunshine and HW acceleration; so much so that I’ve ended up building a Gamestream server from scratch!

The basic underlying idea is to allow the followings:

  • Share a single server (possibly headless but doesn’t have to be) with multiple users
  • by creating virtual HW accelerated desktops
  • whilst keeping remote mouse, keyboard and controllers completely separated
  • with low latency

It’s still rough around the edges, and it needs more testing from the community; if you want to check it out, here you can read the docs and here’s the Github repo.

  • thehatfox@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Wow, this is impressive. Already seems quite stable, I got it running straight away on a headless machine with an Intel i5-7400T running Ubuntu 22.04. I think I need to do some optimising, but I can already use it as a somewhat convoluted way to get proper adblocking on an iPad!

    I noticed a small mistake in the docs - the docker run command in the quickstart is missing a backslash.

    The PulseAudio container also doesn’t stop when the main wolf container stops - not sure if that’s expected behaviour or not.

    I’m excited to see where this project goes, I can see a bunch of uses for this running graphical application remotely.

    • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for trying it out and for the feedback, I’m glad it works!

      You are right, we should probably stop and remove the pulse container; I’ll add it to the things that needs to be improved.

  • tyw0kki@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    This is really awesome, and might fit the bill for a linux terminal server environment im setting up. Ill defo take a look when I can.

  • delcake@lemmy.songsforno.one
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    1 year ago

    Whoa, what a cool project! It seems like way more than I need for single-user purposes, but I’ve been relying on Moonlight, Sunshine, and Chiaki quite a lot more than I ever expected to since I ended up taking quite a liking to using the Steam Deck as a pseudo thin-client. Kind of the best of both worlds letting another machine do the heavy lifting somewhere else in the house, so any advancements in the local game streaming space are extremely welcome to see.

    • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Yeah the Steam Deck is such a perfect target for Moonlight I use it for all the demanding games that I can’t run properly natively or when playing on the couch with a big screen.

  • draecas@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What’s required to map a folder into one of the containers (i.e. retroarch)? I’ve attempted to edit config.toml to include it, but the main wolf container immediately crashes on boot due to interrupt code 11. There’s no other error messages, just a binary stack trace.

    The folder exists. I’ve tried directly mounting the host path as well as mounting it into Wolf-Wolf-1 and using the local path, but nothing works. Even perfectly mirrored paths don’t work. Wolf appears to be running as root so I don’t think it’s a permissions error? I can certainly access the folders. They are a locally mounted NFS, but I’ve used this with dozens of containers without issue.

    • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s probably failing to parse the config.toml file, although that should usually print a proper error line. Have you tried deleting the file or copy and paste the default?

      • draecas@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Looks like the mount definitions require the :ro (or maybe :rq?) at the end unlike regular docker volumes, that was the issue.

        • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          Ooops that was a lazy leftover from my side, sorry about that. Thanks for letting me know, I’ll fix it soon!

    • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      It doesn’t matter, as long as you have Docker installed (and possibly a GPU to HW accelerate things) you are good to go!

      • Upronn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Does it matter what kind of GPU you have? Would any GPU be able to run multiple gaming instances at the same time?

        • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          They should all be supported but there’s only so many types of HW that we can test. So far we’ve got reports of Nvidia, AMD and Intel all working in different setups.

          • Upronn@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That’s great to hear. This might be the holy grail of game streaming server setups. I could build one strong server with one gpu and have it serve an arbitrary number of clients. Since they are all effectively Linux desktops, they should have a wide range of compatibility via WINE and emulators.

            I did some more research and came up with another question: Does Vulkan work on AMD GPUs?