X11 forwarding over SSH to run Holoviz remotely

[faridh]

Hello,

I tried to run my holoscan application remotely over SSH. I did configure X11 forwarding on the server (clara holoscan devkit).

The sshd_config file on the server looks like this:

AllowAgentForwarding yes
#AllowTcpForwarding yes
#GatewayPorts no
X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10
X11UseLocalhost no

On the client (local computer) I run the following command:
ssh user@address -v -AX

The debug information returns that forwarding is activated. I can open any graphical application (e.g. xterm ) on the server without any issue. From inside a container on the server, however, I get the following error when running an application which uses holoviz:

Glfw Error 65544: X11: Failed to open display localhost:12.0
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  Failed to initialize glfw
Aborted (core dumped)

I ran the container following your guide with --net host, -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix and -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY.

Do you know how to set the display inside the container such that holoviz window is forwarded?

Any help would be much appreciated.

[jinl]

Disclaimer: this is not an officially tested solution. I have had success previously with forwarding from within a container on a remote server by a solution I found online

XSOCK=/tmp/.X11-unix
XAUTH=/tmp/.docker.xauth
xauth nlist $DISPLAY | sed -e 's/^..../ffff/' | sudo xauth -f $XAUTH nmerge -
sudo chmod 777 $XAUTH
# minimal docker container to test forwarding:
docker run -ti -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v $XSOCK:$XSOCK -v $XAUTH:$XAUTH -e XAUTHORITY=$XAUTH --net host ubuntu:latest

Similarly when running the Holoscan container, I add the following to the docker run command: -v $XAUTH:$XAUTH -e XAUTHORITY=$XAUTH.

Let us know how this work out!

[faridh]

The suggested approach works quite well. Thanks for the help.