Install required packages

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yay -Syu qemu-desktop libvirt edk2-ovmf virt-manager dnsmasq dmidecode bridge-utils spice-protocol libsamplerate

Configuration

Setup Libvirtd

Firstly we will need to enable the networking for libvirt and the libvirt service, which the below commands will do. And also add our user to the libvirt group(for convience), do know this is a massive security risk as it’s the same as just giving the user no password root acces, if you do not want this you can ignore the last command but be aware you will have to enter a pasword when you wanna start your VM and do other such functions

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systemctl enable --now libvirtd
sudo virsh net-autostart default
sudo virsh net-start default
sudo usermod -aG libvirt $USER

Enable PCIE Isolation

First add this to your boot parameters, what this does is enable IOMMU which let’s use later give our GPU’s control over to the Virtual Machine, if you do not know how to do this please consult Arch Wiki

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intel_iommu=on OR amd_iommu=on

After this we need to get the vfio-pci id’s, you can find this with the below IOMMU script. You will want to look for all the PCI Id’s that match your GPU, the ID’s will be in the format “XXXX:XXXX” and will be after the device name

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#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob
for g in $(find /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/* -maxdepth 0 -type d | sort -V); do
    echo "IOMMU Group ${g##*/}:"
    for d in $g/devices/*; do
        echo -e "\t$(lspci -nns ${d##*/})"
    done;
done;

Then go into the boot loader entry and add the below to your boot parameters, adding the PCI id’s split by comma’s.

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vfio-pci.ids=XXXX:XXXX,XXXX:XXXX

After this you want to go ahead and add the vfio modules to the mkincipio or whatever initframs generator your using.

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MODULES=(... vfio_pci vfio vfio_iommu_type1 ...)

Regenarate the initframs which is done with the command

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sudo mkinitcpio -P

Setup networking bridge

After this we setup a network bridge so we can get better performance, if you use WiFi then you can ignore this step, to get the interface name run “ip addr”

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nmcli connection add type bridge ifname br0 stp no
nmcli connection add type bridge-slave ifname (Interface) master br0

Install Looking Glass

Download from the website

Install required dependancies

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pacman -Syu cmake gcc libgl libegl fontconfig spice-protocol make nettle pkgconf binutils libxi libxinerama libxss libxcursor libxpresent libxkbcommon wayland-protocols ttf-dejavu libsamplerate

Next we will want to move our archive into a directory where we can work with it so we can in the next step compile it into a binary.

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mkdir ~/.VirtualMachine
mv ~/Downloads/looking-glass* ~/.VirtualMachine/
cd ~/.VirtualMachine
tar xvf looking-glass*
rm looking-glass*.tar.gz

Build the client

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cd looking-glass*
mkdir -p client/build
cd client/build
cmake ../
make
cp looking-glass-client ~/.VirtualMachine/

Add temp file to /etc/tmpfiles.d/10-looking-glass.conf

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sudo nano /etc/tmpfiles.d/10-looking-glass.conf

f /dev/shm/looking-glass 0660 (user) kvm

Setup Virtual Machine

Downloads windows 10 ISO: here

Next we will want to move our windows ISO into our storage directory so we know where can find it.

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mv ~/Downloads/Win10* ~/.VirtualMachine/

Go into the Virtual Machine Manager UI and enable XML editing.

Now go ahead and setup the VM with your wanted settings, including the network bridge we created earlier and with the ISO we just downloaded in the virtual-machine-manager UI, but click “I want to edit VM”, before finishing.

Now go and add the PCIE devices of the GPU by going Add device and then PCIE Device, add all the ones that match your GPU’s. After this go into the xml editor and add the below into the “devices” section at the end.

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<shmem name='looking-glass'>
  <model type='ivshmem-plain'/>
  <size unit='M'>64</size>
</shmem>

After this go ahead and add the enlightenments into your XML in the “features” section, what we are doing here is enabling a bunch of optimizations.

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<features> 
	<hyperv mode='custom'> 
		<relaxed state='on'/>
		<vapic state='on'/>
		<spinlocks state='on' retries='8191'/>
		<vpindex state='on'/>
		<runtime state='on'/>
		<synic state='on'/>
		<stimer state="on"/>
		<reset state='off'/>
		<vendor_id state='on' value='whatever'/>
		<frequencies state='on'/>
		<reenlightenment state='off'/> 
		<tlbflush state='on'/>
		<ipi state='on'/>
		<evmcs state='off'/>
	</hyperv> 
	<kvm> 
		<hidden state="on"/>
	</kvm>
	<ioapic driver='kvm'/>
</features>

After this you can go ahead and startup the virtual machine and setup windows as you normally would, after this you will want to go to the Looking Glass Website, and download the windows host binary that matches the version you downloaded earlier. Go ahead and run the installer and it will setup. After this you can either mirror the displays so that if the looking glass app crashes you will be able to use spice on windows, or for full performance disable the spice display and just let looking glass handle it.

I hope this guide was helpful and if it did you can leave a Star on the Repository