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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    2 years 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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      2 years 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.

  • delcake@lemmy.songsforno.one
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    2 years 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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      2 years 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.

  • tyw0kki@programming.dev
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    2 years 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.

    • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 years 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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        2 years 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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          2 years 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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            2 years 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?

  • draecas@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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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      2 years 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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        2 years 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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          2 years ago

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

  • llanoraw@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Very nice! I’ve been on the hunt for a headless gamestream solution but not found something yet so will definitely be watching this project.

    On first run it was failing to work, console log was showing http errors.

    Also, it looks like lots of things run with Docker priveleged=true / root permissions? That’s a no-go in my book. Any reason why?

    • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 years ago

      On first run it was failing to work, console log was showing http errors.

      Would you like to open up an issue on Github or share some logs in our Discord channel?

      Also, it looks like lots of things run with Docker priveleged=true

      Are you talking about Games on Whales compose file and script? That’s a bit legacy as things are right now, Wolf does run all containers as unprivileged by default

      • llanoraw@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Oops! Mixed up the two repos. Thanks for clarifying.

        I’ll post a log as well with the error I’m getting.

        • abeltramo@lemmy.worldOP
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          2 years ago

          Makes sense, as for the HTTP errors someone else reported on the Discord server that it might happen if you had previously paired on that host with Sunshine. If you unpair from Moonlight and pair again it seems to work