GenesiGenesiWiki
Virtualization

EGL Headless

GPU-accelerated display for a VM with no virtual monitor attached.

EGL headless is a libvirt display mode that gives a VM GPU-accelerated rendering without a virtual monitor drawing to a window. The guest renders on the host GPU, and you attach a viewer separately — useful for GPU compute, remote-viewed VMs, or a Looking Glass setup where a low-latency client displays the frames.

This is an advanced, niche configuration. Get an ordinary QEMU/KVM VM working first; only reach for EGL headless when you specifically need GPU acceleration without a Spice/GTK window.

Enable it

In the VM's libvirt XML (virsh edit <vm>), add an EGL headless graphics device alongside a virtio video device with 3D acceleration:

<graphics type='egl-headless'/>
<video>
  <model type='virtio' heads='1'>
    <acceleration accel3d='yes'/>
  </model>
</video>

The host needs working GPU drivers and the virgl/virglrenderer stack for 3D:

sudo pacman -S virglrenderer

Then connect a viewer — a Spice client, or Looking Glass for the lowest latency.

The exact viewer setup varies; the CachyOS EGL Headless guide walks through a complete configuration that applies directly to Genesi.

QEMU User Session

Run virtual machines as your own user, without system-level libvirt privileges.

Virtio + Venus (Vulkan in VMs)

Near-native Vulkan acceleration inside a virtual machine via virtio-gpu and Venus.

On this page

Enable it