2 Gamers, 1 CPU, NO VIRTUALIZATION! | Linux Multiseat with Hardware Accelerated OpenGL+Vulkan

With GPU prices through the roof, silicon shortages, and scalpers eating up the GPU market, how are you and your friends (or brother in my case) able to afford two complete gaming rigs? Why can't you share the parts that aren't directly contributing fps and run two games on the same system? That's exactly what I'm doing today. 2 Gamers on 1 System.

Viewers of my channel have probably seen Linus's classic '2 gamers, 1 CPU' video. Like many before and after him, this solution to sharing a gaming computer relies on virtualization - running an operating system in a hypervisor, and passing through some hardware. If you can afford to spare an extra graphics device for your hypervisor and partition your RAM and CPU for each machine, deal with the complexities of setting up PCIe passthrough, and also pay for the storage space for two complete operating system installations, it does function. But today I have a better solution!

This is Linux Multiseat. Two users, logged in to the same system, each with their own full monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Both of them have full hardware acceleration with OpenGL and Vulkan, and can run games as well as the GPU is capable. I'm still using two GPUs to do this, but I can now put the integrated GPU to use for one of the users instead of wasting it on the hypervisor. Each user can log in to their account on either 'seat', and have the full power of the GPU assigned to that seat. System resources such as RAM and CPU are fully shared, so there's no need to partition, and when running more demanding games you can simply log out of the second seat to free the resources.

Setting up multiseat on Linux has been a life long dream of mine, since I saw articles about it way back when I was in high school. I've finally been able to achieve it, thanks to great improvements in Linux's display system, and VALVe's great work to improve gaming on Linux.

Blog post for this article:
https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2022/mul...

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:35 - What Is Multiseat?
02:24 - Hardware Choices
03:30 - Software Installation
04:50 - My Multiseat History
07:24 - System Setup
09:32 - Configuring Seats
15:14 - Configuring Seat GPUs
16:38 - Configuring Seat USB
19:42 - Steam Mesa Packages
20:28 - Game Library Deduplication
21:58 - Playing Games!
22:38 - Conclusion

#LinuxGaming
#Multiseat
#Linux
#Virtualization