Community Spotlight: Harjinder Singh’s GPU-Accelerated ThinLinc Lab (AlmaLinux, VirtualGL & XFCE)

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Hey everyone,

With the recent HP Teradici/PCoIP/ Anyware EOL announcement, a lot of EUC engineers are looking for robust Linux remoting alternatives.

Recently, Harjinder Singh (Citrix/EUC Consultant) built out an incredibly detailed POC lab using ThinLinc to test GPU-accelerated workloads for VFX and CAD, and the results are well worth highlighting here.

You can check out his original LinkedIn posts:

Here is a breakdown of his lab and findings:

The Infrastructure Stack

  • OS: AlmaLinux 9.7

  • Hardware: NVIDIA P4000 GPU (Passthrough)

  • Virtualization: Vates Virtualization Management Stack (XCP-ng / Xen Orchestra)

  • Broker: Cendio ThinLinc (+ Web Access)

  • Acceleration: VirtualGL

The Journey: GNOME vs. XFCE Harjinder initially started testing with GNOME (Foundation 40.x). While general responsiveness was good, he ran into a few bottlenecks, most notably, Blender falling back to CPU rendering despite seeing the P4000.

To optimize, he rebuilt the VDA using XFCE and updated VirtualGL. The result? A massive improvement in responsiveness, stable session performance, and resolved application crashes.

Application Performance Highlights With VirtualGL updated and XFCE running smoothly, the GPU acceleration truly kicked in:

  • Blender (v5.1): Cycles rendering (300 samples) dropped from a painful 52 minutes on the CPU down to just 3 minutes and 42 seconds on the GPU.

  • FreeCAD: Architectural/BIM workloads ran smoothly with stable CPU load and low GPU utilization.

  • DaVinci Resolve: Successfully auto-detected multiple monitors with highly responsive playback and timeline scrubbing.

What’s Next for the Lab? Harjinder is still testing, with plans to tackle high-latency network scenarios, audio/video redirection, AD integration, and multi-session load testing.

Let’s Discuss:

  • Have any of you tested DaVinci Resolve or FreeCAD over ThinLinc? What was your experience?

  • Do you agree with the XFCE over GNOME preference for these types of heavy 3D workloads?

Let us know below, and a huge thank you to Harjinder for sharing his setup with the EUC community!

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Hi everyone — thanks again to the ThinLinc team for sharing the posts and putting together the spotlight thread.

I’m still pretty early in the POC and definitely still learning parts of both Linux and ThinLinc as the lab evolves.

Most of my background has actually been around Windows-based Citrix CVAD deployments, with only some dabbling in Linux VDA work over the last year or so, so this project has been as much a learning exercise for me as it has been a technical POC.

The original idea behind the lab was to try something closer to a real Linux VFX/CAD/AEC production workstation environment where companies are likely using PCoIP/Teradici/DCV for remote working instead of Citrix/Horizon. I was recommended Thinlinc as a solution after HP’s odd decision to shutter PCoIP.

The main goals were:

  • Build a good Linux workstation environment aligned as closely as possible to the VFX Reference Platform standard.
  • Compare different Linux remoting approaches including CVAD,ThinLinc, and Amazon Web Services DCV
  • Test Linux GPU remoting for general and VFX/AEC/CAD workflows.- how does it compare to Citrix and its HDX protocol.
  • Provider a good user experience.

The choice of AlmaLinux 9.7 was intentional and came down to:

  • Alma/Rocky/RHEL 9.x is the VFX reference platform for Linux workstations.
  • Application compatibility and vendor support - BlackMagic Design “Da Vinci Resolve”, SideFX Houdini, Citrix etc.
  • Citrix/Ominssa Linux VDA support is essentially the same as the VFX reference Linux standard - RHEL/Rocky 9.x.
  • Previously looked at Rocky 9.4 Linux VDAs with Citrix CVAD.

Apps such as Da Vinci Resolve and SideFX Houdini are only supported on Alma/Rocky/RHEL 9.x, so my aim was to stay as close to what might actually be seen in production Linux workstation deployments and aim to have a stable VDA.

Still lots left to learn, improve and test. Hopefully some of the findings are useful to others.

Harj