I own 3 JetKVMs, of which two of them stopped working, one of which doesn't boot at all and the other that never connects to network. The third I took out of service because the keyboard wouldn't send input when it was connected for more than a couple months. I'm sure the newer hardware is better, but I'm very unhappy with my JetKVMs.
I have two and one stopped working, but they were great and sent me a replacement motherboard and a toolkit to swap it over. Did you try reaching out to them?
I've had good experiences with mine, only thing is that wifi and ethernet claims the same IP which causes my Unifi controller to freak out and send alerts
FWIW, I have two JetKVMs from the original Kickstarter campaign, and both have been in continuous use since the day I received them without a single issue. So the experience definitely varies.
It not exactly a KVM switch, which allows you to have one set of keyboard, mouse, monitor connected to multiple PCs and switch between them. This is an IP KVM, which lets you send keyboard and mouse inputs and view display output remotely over the network.
Are there any good KVMs for gaming? Right now, I use a capture card for video, connect the mouse directly to the destination, and use a piece of software called Deskflow to transmit my keyboard. But Deskflow occasionally crashes, so it'd be nice to have a hardware solution (also that can be used for BIOS/etc). And Deskflow also won't work if I install SteamOS once that supports Nvidia.
I looked at making a solution myself, but for some reason, simulating a USB client device in software is extremely annoying, and requires specialized hardware that is also very expensive. So at that point, why not just get a KVM...
The practical answer for right now is that I don't want software screen capture, but it also does not do any of the things I wanted to be able to do by having remote inputs directed to the hardware rather than simulated in software. Namely it requires software installation on the server, which means OS support becomes a thing, you can't use it in BIOS/firmware, etc.
Sunshine works on linux and windows, screen capture uses parts of the gpu meant to do that as result you get lower latency than separate capture and encode.
I don't really understand your setup, but if you throw enough money at ATEN they will be happy to give you a KVM that handles 4K @ 240Hz. Supporting high refresh rates is the main thing that would keep from using most KVMs for gaming.
Ah, I neglected to mention that my keyboard isn't separate hardware. I'm using the built-in keyboard and display of my laptop, and would like to continue doing so. So hardware switches that depend on dumb monitors and keyboards don't work for me (and that's why I said KVM, not switch).
Most KVMs that fail at 4K get the EDID wrong. They either send their own fixed one (often maxing out at 1080p or 4K30), or they reconnect the display on every switch, so the OS thinks it's a new monitor and resets your scaling. Look for one with EDID emulation.
For high refresh 4K you also need HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort with DSC support, and a lot of "4K" KVMs don't have it.
Also, 1080p divides evenly into 4K, so turn on integer scaling in the Nvidia or AMD settings and 1080p will look sharp instead of blurry.
KVMs are for rebooting and recovering servers without needing physical access. Maybe you would have some chance with HDMI splitter connected with an EDID dummy plug and an HDMI-Ethernet capture encoder thing, and some dedicated KVM for just keyboard and mouse, but idk.
I have an ATEN KVM [1] that gets a solid "it does the job" from me. Occasionally a connected computer won't pick up the K, V, or M, and I'll have to reconnect a few times.
I use it to switch between my work laptop and my personal PC, and for this situation 4K is a must have. That, and the choice of HDMI instead of DisplayPort, and things that would keep me from getting a JetKVM.
i am not sure i would trust a two month old project "based on a three month old proof of concept" over a product that has been around for years, but it is good to know it is there
It is really hard to find on the site what kvm stands for. Guess people going there knows what it stands for but think it could be spelled out once at least.
Warning: Don't browse the document site, it's filled with domain-specific jargon like FPS, BIOS, LAN, HDMI and other things, and not a single one is explained first! They should clearly read "Product Websites for Dummies" again.
Not to be taken in a bad way but, so many people wondering "what is a KVM" is telling a lot about HN reader base evolution.
It used to be a time that any proper geek/hacker would obviously know what a KVM is. More the normal KVM than the IP-KVM that could be considered a marvel of our time in the end.
Because it was so common to have just a single screen and keyboard but multiple tower desktop computers. Especially at school and home.
Nowadays we mostly all use laptops so it is well irrelevant and I guess only a few young reader ever saw one in the field.
Agreed, except for "just". To me a KVM is a physical switch for 2 computers to share the same wired peripherals. It took me 4 different tries to find a page which explained what this one is.
Meh. The challenge is 4k+ at high display frequency that doesn't cost the same as a small boat. There are gazillions of KVM switches that do 1080. That's easy.
The big “tail” on the original gives you something to build an enclosure around, and the ports are all on the face opposite the display. That shape makes it easy to 3d print a mount for a 10” rack.
This one has stuff on four out of six surfaces (display, button, card slot, ports), and the two free surfaces are at a right angle to each other instead of being on opposite sides, so this gives you little to no leeway for mounting semi-permanently without some adhesive.
I was thinking the point was it was so light to have it hanging on the cables themselves, as I'm certain absolutely no one does in any of their installations...
Wait, do I understand correctly that you can only boot ISOs off a microSD card that I have to pre-load? I can’t just put in a card and load ISOs over the web interface? That makes the use case of full remote control (after plugging it in for the first time, of course) kinda moot…
Otherwise, this seems to be a great product for homelab stuff :)
What’s a decent quality IP KVM solution that’s not too expensive? We’re looking to put a dozen of mac minis in a collocation, and currently investigating solutions for remote access.
I do this for porting things to DOS. Was swapping a CF card back and forth between a 486 PC and my laptop that was running Claude and it was extremely tedious and required me to physically be at the system.
Automated it entirely by giving Claude hands/eyes/ears so it can take complete control of the 486 using a raspberrypi 5, a usb4vc HAT for PS/2 and a VGA capture device. Adding an ethernet card and a tcp/ip boot profile for FTP, Claude then can update binaries, test them, and gather logs. Now I just steer Claude and it handles interfacing with the machine for me.
I had no idea KVMs existed until an agent filled me in last night (I had the idea of building one with an fpga so an agent could drive os installation). Lo and behold the next day KVMs are on the front page of Hacker News!
This is seriously impressive for something the size of a matchbox. $39 for 1080p KVM + cloud access is hard to ignore. Who else is planning to grab one?
Using one for couple of months so far. I need it once a month for a couple of hours or so, but it saves me 3x more time, so money well spent. But wow, at 3x less price tag it a deal!
I have 4 of the old ones in service and they're great. Whenever I need to remotely reboot a server those come in handy just great, no more fear of what I'm going to do if the server doesn't come back online.
It also solved the issue I had with entering a password on FDE (full disk encryption) systems. Previously I had to rely on a janky solution with booting into BusyBox so that the system can be accessed remotely and using that to enter the password. Now it's just plain FDE set up during Debian install - I reboot, use JetKVM to enter the password and that's it.
One note though - I don't use their online cloud service access thingy and connect to those using my Wireguard deployment. The hardware is nice, open source is nice, but I wouldn't trust that level of access to any cloud solution by any vendor.
>It also solved the issue I had with entering a password on FDE (full disk encryption) systems
I've fixed that with secure boot (my own keys, not Microsoft's) and TPM2. From that host I can run a program named Tang, which operates in conjunction with another program named Clevis.
On hosts without secure boot such as RPis and other ARM SBCs, Clevis will contact Tang at boot time and decrypt the disk.
Incidentally my x86 with secure boot has intel vPro so the KVM is not needed. The remaining sisters have a piece of lost technology used for decades to solve the KVM problem: serial (UART specifically) connections.
Some seasoned sysadmins might have memories of dialing their Sun servers serial ports for remote administration.
To me, it is a feature to have a password required at boot to unlock the drive. Relying on TPM for keymatter is convenient but comes with caveats I don't like. I don't personally trust that the boot chain and OS on a modern system are secure enough for this model to be similarly secure to using a passphrase properly. And if I care enough to try to secure something in this way, I definitely care enough to pick something that I believe would be at least truly secure at rest with a decent degree of certainty.
TPM based unlock does at least still fulfill the goal of ensuring data stored to disk is encrypted so that it can't easily be recovered from a discarded drive.
I like jetkvm a lot but the splitter with the dual USB-c’s is really, really finicky and will say it’s not connected for seemingly no reason. They don’t even send you all the cables you need (which I’m sorry, but jetkvm team if you’re reading this, that’s ridiculous) so you’re just kind of rotating through your pile until you find one that it arbitrarily accepts. Power in particular just refuses to work with many cables for some odd reason. Kind of annoying, I would rather just pay the extra cost and have all the exact cables I need out the box.
At least the new ones dropped the splitter and put 2 separate ports it seems.
Not really related to this, but are there good non-IP KVM's left? I'm in the market for one so we can move two home office desks into 1, but all the ones I find seem kinda shit. Asking for USB-C + 2 hdmi or displayports is apparently unreasonable
The cheap alternative I use is based on a USB switch hub and a monitor that has enough inputs for all of the computers I want to switch between.
The hub is a very simple and inexpensive device that essentially just lets you change USB devices between computers. It has 4 ports for USB devices, and 4 input ports for USB hosts. There is a wired remote control that allows you to switch between the hosts.
The way you turn this into a KVM-like device is by having each host connected to the monitor/s indepentently. In my case, I have only two hosts, and each one is connected via HDMI cable to my single monitor. Each host is set up to detect when the USB hub is connected, and then send a DDC command to switch the monitor input over to itself.
The end user experience is: I press a button on the wired remote, which is mounted on my keyboard tray, and then after a short delay the corresponding computer is on my screen and everything works normally.
On linux, this is trivially accomplished with a udev rule + a script calling ddcutil.
On my work machine, a Mac, I could not find a simple solution that worked reliably on my specific Macbook Pro model that I would recommend, so I had an AI write a custom daemon for this purpose.
The major benefit of this "poor man's KVM" is that you do not need an expensive and finnicky piece of KVM hardware. You do not need to worry about the video chip supporting your setup, or firmware bugs. You buy one cheap, commodity product. The downside is the reliance on the hosts, and on monitor features, and having to set up the functionality manually. In my case, this is the sort of thing I basically just set up and then never touched again, so it was a fine trade-off. If I get new computers, or a new monitor, or I change which porta the computers are attached to, then I have to change the code.
I have an OG JetKVM and it works solidly but the thing that prevents me from using it is no video pass through. The awkwardness of an ‘invisible’ monitor connected to windows at all times is hard to live with - windows and apps open there and I’m constantly having to pull them back to an another monitor. My next KVM will be pass through for this reason, but the consumer ones seem to top out at 4k30, which is not great either.
why not just configure Windows to mirror the displays? That seems a lot cheaper and more flexible than pass through. And you wouldn't need to worry about matching resolutions and refresh rates
In that case I’d need a 1080 physical display on the machine mirrored to the KVM. For the type of stuff I’m doing that’s a bad use of monitor / desk real estate.
The higher-end GL-iNet Comets have passthrough. I have the 5G cellular equipped one connected to my OpenBSD home router so if I lose Internet connectivity at home while I am traveling, I can still debug and do something about it.
He likes JetKVM. However, they appear to be sold out. The Mini seems great but I have yet to receive a preordered item on the advertised timeline.
That article pointed to ArkKVM which is a hardware clone of JetKVM but they have now released their own software stack as open source which has Tailscale support
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 3.3 ms ] threadhttps://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/e...
I learnt this first myself from HN, a few months ago.
(I agree that they should spell it out on the website.)
I looked at making a solution myself, but for some reason, simulating a USB client device in software is extremely annoying, and requires specialized hardware that is also very expensive. So at that point, why not just get a KVM...
Pretty much any off-the-shelf SBC can present itself as a USB HID device like a keyboard. You can buy a very capable rp2040-based board for <$5.
What part of this equation requires expensive hardware?
For high refresh 4K you also need HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort with DSC support, and a lot of "4K" KVMs don't have it.
Also, 1080p divides evenly into 4K, so turn on integer scaling in the Nvidia or AMD settings and 1080p will look sharp instead of blurry.
I use it to switch between my work laptop and my personal PC, and for this situation 4K is a must have. That, and the choice of HDMI instead of DisplayPort, and things that would keep me from getting a JetKVM.
[1]: https://www.aten.com/gb/en/products/kvm/desktop-kvm-switches...
https://nascompares.com/2026/06/26/gl-inet-comet-x-kvm-early...
It used to be a time that any proper geek/hacker would obviously know what a KVM is. More the normal KVM than the IP-KVM that could be considered a marvel of our time in the end.
Because it was so common to have just a single screen and keyboard but multiple tower desktop computers. Especially at school and home. Nowadays we mostly all use laptops so it is well irrelevant and I guess only a few young reader ever saw one in the field.
The big “tail” on the original gives you something to build an enclosure around, and the ports are all on the face opposite the display. That shape makes it easy to 3d print a mount for a 10” rack.
This one has stuff on four out of six surfaces (display, button, card slot, ports), and the two free surfaces are at a right angle to each other instead of being on opposite sides, so this gives you little to no leeway for mounting semi-permanently without some adhesive.
https://sipeed.com/nanokvm-go
Which solutions perform well?
Automated it entirely by giving Claude hands/eyes/ears so it can take complete control of the 486 using a raspberrypi 5, a usb4vc HAT for PS/2 and a VGA capture device. Adding an ethernet card and a tcp/ip boot profile for FTP, Claude then can update binaries, test them, and gather logs. Now I just steer Claude and it handles interfacing with the machine for me.
https://github.com/ecliptik/vcctrl/tree/main/
It also solved the issue I had with entering a password on FDE (full disk encryption) systems. Previously I had to rely on a janky solution with booting into BusyBox so that the system can be accessed remotely and using that to enter the password. Now it's just plain FDE set up during Debian install - I reboot, use JetKVM to enter the password and that's it.
One note though - I don't use their online cloud service access thingy and connect to those using my Wireguard deployment. The hardware is nice, open source is nice, but I wouldn't trust that level of access to any cloud solution by any vendor.
I've fixed that with secure boot (my own keys, not Microsoft's) and TPM2. From that host I can run a program named Tang, which operates in conjunction with another program named Clevis.
On hosts without secure boot such as RPis and other ARM SBCs, Clevis will contact Tang at boot time and decrypt the disk.
Incidentally my x86 with secure boot has intel vPro so the KVM is not needed. The remaining sisters have a piece of lost technology used for decades to solve the KVM problem: serial (UART specifically) connections.
Some seasoned sysadmins might have memories of dialing their Sun servers serial ports for remote administration.
TPM based unlock does at least still fulfill the goal of ensuring data stored to disk is encrypted so that it can't easily be recovered from a discarded drive.
It is either on my LAN with that server available, or you will need to enter a key.
At least the new ones dropped the splitter and put 2 separate ports it seems.
The hub is a very simple and inexpensive device that essentially just lets you change USB devices between computers. It has 4 ports for USB devices, and 4 input ports for USB hosts. There is a wired remote control that allows you to switch between the hosts.
The way you turn this into a KVM-like device is by having each host connected to the monitor/s indepentently. In my case, I have only two hosts, and each one is connected via HDMI cable to my single monitor. Each host is set up to detect when the USB hub is connected, and then send a DDC command to switch the monitor input over to itself.
The end user experience is: I press a button on the wired remote, which is mounted on my keyboard tray, and then after a short delay the corresponding computer is on my screen and everything works normally.
On linux, this is trivially accomplished with a udev rule + a script calling ddcutil.
On my work machine, a Mac, I could not find a simple solution that worked reliably on my specific Macbook Pro model that I would recommend, so I had an AI write a custom daemon for this purpose.
The major benefit of this "poor man's KVM" is that you do not need an expensive and finnicky piece of KVM hardware. You do not need to worry about the video chip supporting your setup, or firmware bugs. You buy one cheap, commodity product. The downside is the reliance on the hosts, and on monitor features, and having to set up the functionality manually. In my case, this is the sort of thing I basically just set up and then never touched again, so it was a fine trade-off. If I get new computers, or a new monitor, or I change which porta the computers are attached to, then I have to change the code.
I'd love to play more with it, but Aliexpress sellers have hiked up prices immensely; a P4 dev board goes for almost €100, when the chip costs €6.
He likes JetKVM. However, they appear to be sold out. The Mini seems great but I have yet to receive a preordered item on the advertised timeline.
That article pointed to ArkKVM which is a hardware clone of JetKVM but they have now released their own software stack as open source which has Tailscale support
* https://store.arkkvm.com/blog/detail/arkkvm-fully-open-sourc...
* https://store.arkkvm.com/blog/detail/arkkvm-ota-release-note...