With price of PC components getting more expensive I was thinking of experimenting with a multi-seat type setup on my gaming PC. From what I was reading though, multi-seat requires a dedicated GPU for each seat since the compositor is expected to have an exclusive lock on the card.
Does anyone know if you can do a mult-seat like setup with a single GPU? I have a amd 9070 xt so as far as I know the gpu virtualization thing where you split a single physical GPU into multiple virtual GPUs won’t work. I was thinking maybe its possible to have a weak secondary GPU just for display, but I don’t know if the second seat would be able to still access the more powerful gaming GPU for rendering.
You are probably looking for something like games on whales https://games-on-whales.github.io/. If you have an extra weak gpu or an integrated one besides your 9070xt, you can use that for the video transcoding and the big gpu for the game rendering
The uhh a16 I think is four gpu card intended for remote working that would be a natural fit to this. Except that it has no outputs.
You can do what you’re asking about in x, but I don’t think in Wayland.
How do you do it with x? I would be interested in looking at this.
I think in theory it could be done in Wayland if a compositor implements multi-seat support. There is a fork of wlroots & labwc in this repo that seems like it’s trying to do that https://github.com/garlett/multiseat
Typically this is achieved in x11 with x forwarding. Performance won’t be great.
However: you may want to investigate using a hypervisor and a VM for each seat, and a dedicated GPU for each seat. To share GPU between seats, you will need a GPU and motherboard that support sr-iov, which is hard to find, hard to use, and expensive.
I built a hyper-converged box like this and I can tell you the GPU isn’t the obstacle, it’s peripherals. Mice, keyboard, video output, that is what people want to be flexible.