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.
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.