OpenGL Render Locally and view over SSH

Question

I need to render an OpenGL screen and pass the render across SSH. GLX Commands will not work as the remote machine does not have the necessary extensions.

Without root access to the remote machine, I can't go with a solution like VGL. Any other scenarios for viewing a render remotely?

VNC is not working on the systems, and I cannot install any software that requires root access.

VNC, but it would be slow. Without GLX, i highly doubt there is a good solution available. — keltar
– keltar, Commented Nov 20, 2013 at 3:34

datenwolf · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-31 09:17:57Z

4

If you can start an X server you might have some luck using Xpra. Xpra is a special window manager that uses the Composite extension to get hold of each window; it then wraps the window's contents in an efficient encoding to be viewed by Xpra clients.

Xpra itself is written in Python with a little C glue code and can be installed also in a user's home directory. You can specify the X server and the commands line to use with the --xvfb option on the xpra server side. Although it's named xvfb, any X server will do.

Take notice that with the current OpenGL and graphics driver models on Linux only one X server can hold the GPU at a time. So you can't start multiple Xpra instances on the GPU on the same time. Also if there was already another user of the GPU you can't use it as well. Hopefully this limitation goes away soon with offscreen hardware accelerated EGL support.

In the meantime using Xpra is my personal preferred choice for remote high performance OpenGL rendering.

edited Aug 31, 2017 at 9:17

answered Nov 20, 2013 at 6:41

datenwolf

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6 Comments

jscott Over a year ago

I think this is the right approach. I can't start an XServer remotely, as this is a public lab machine and I don't have admin rights. There could be another person using the machine locally so I can't really touch XServer. I don't really need to do it efficiently, I just need to view what is happening to verify behavior WITHOUT access to VNC.

totaam Over a year ago

@jscott you don't need admin rights to start an Xvfb X11 server as used by xpra. This has no impact whatsoever on other local users.

datenwolf Over a year ago

@jscott: totaam is right. You can use a Xvfb instead of Xserver then. Your system probably has Mesa installed somewhere, so even if proprietary drivers are used for the regular Xserver, you can LD_PRELOAD the libGL.so of Mesa to give everything within the Xvfb session software rasterization OpenGL capabilities.

Tsathoggua Over a year ago

@datenwolf "Also if there was already another user of the GPU you can use it as well." Do you mean can or can't?

datenwolf Over a year ago

@Tsathoggua: nice catch. It's "(…) can't (…)". I edited the answer.

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