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  • VMware's Linux 3D Guest Driver Is Ready

    Phoronix: VMware's Linux 3D Guest Driver Is Ready

    The xf86-video-vmware 12.0 driver was officially released yesterday, which now means all of the components needed for 3D Linux guest acceleration are now available and stable...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Isn't this fad over yet?

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    • #3
      holy moly

      Sounds very interesting. I was paying close attention to KVM, but unfortunatelly nothing specifically interesting from there at the moment.

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      • #4
        VMware has bigger problems on Linux right now than 3D. With recent kernels (meaning anything more recent than 2.6.38 or near that) guest OSes totally freeze whenever there's any disk activity on the host. It's almost unusable right now. And that's with the VMware Tools installed, even.

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        • #5
          not for me

          Originally posted by RealNC View Post
          VMware has bigger problems on Linux right now than 3D. With recent kernels (meaning anything more recent than 2.6.38 or near that) guest OSes totally freeze whenever there's any disk activity on the host. It's almost unusable right now. And that's with the VMware Tools installed, even.
          I'm not seeing anything like that.

          I'm running Workstation 8.0.2 on Fedora 15 (2.6.41.10-3.fc15.x86_64) and everything works great. I have guests running: Solaris, Windows, RHEL, SLES, Fedora 16, Ubuntu, all kinds of guest kernels from 2.6.8 to 3.2. With my RAID setup, I get about 550 Megabytes/sec disk write speeds when I push the 'Suspend' button on a VM, and about 400 Megabytes/sec read speed when I push the 'Resume' button. Other apps run fine while all this disk IO is going on. I have automated test suites that tax both CPU and disk IO, I can run them on multiple VMs simultaneously and get good performance on all of them, all at once, while I surf with firefox in yet another VM.

          I don't have hard numbers, but I have been running Workstation for 3+ years on this hardware, and it works better and faster now than it ever has.

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          • #6
            You have a RAID setup, I only have one disk. You use an old kernel, I use 3.2.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by RealNC View Post
              You have a RAID setup, I only have one disk. You use an old kernel, I use 3.2.
              I use 3.2 on Gentoo as both a guest and a host without any problems with VMWare Player.

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              • #8
                Then I don't know. If I play some music inside the guest for example, then enter "sync" in the host, the music in the guest pauses for a bit. But that's just a way to make the problem "audible", it's not limited to sound. Even the mouse freezes and sometimes key-presses get stuck (you press "a" and if at that moment there happens to be disk I/O on the host, you get "aaaaaaaaaaa".)

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by RealNC View Post
                  Then I don't know. If I play some music inside the guest for example, then enter "sync" in the host, the music in the guest pauses for a bit. But that's just a way to make the problem "audible", it's not limited to sound. Even the mouse freezes and sometimes key-presses get stuck (you press "a" and if at that moment there happens to be disk I/O on the host, you get "aaaaaaaaaaa".)
                  Can you try it with other sound hardware? There might be a bug in your sound driver. I've had problems with a 5.1 USB sound adapter and with two different sound cards. In the end I gave up, plugged the speakers into another computer and used remote pulseaudio (works like a charm).

                  Back to the original thread, has anyone gotten the new 3D setup to work on the fedora 17 alpha? I've poked around at it, but it just crashes.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by RealNC View Post
                    Then I don't know. If I play some music inside the guest for example, then enter "sync" in the host, the music in the guest pauses for a bit. But that's just a way to make the problem "audible", it's not limited to sound. Even the mouse freezes and sometimes key-presses get stuck (you press "a" and if at that moment there happens to be disk I/O on the host, you get "aaaaaaaaaaa".)
                    +1. I can reproduce this on a Windows host and a Linux guest. Getting EXACTLY this behavior, audio and all.

                    Do you have a support agreement with VMware? I bought Workstation 7 a long time ago and upgraded to Workstation 8; I'm not sure that I can get "official" support from them at all. And last time I put in a ticket, I kept getting emails from their support guy saying "we're still looking into this problem, hang tight" for like 8 months, then it finally came back after a minor release saying it was fixed, and I had long since moved on from that OS (it was a release of Fedora that wasn't working, and the new release was out for several months by the time they fixed the previous one.)

                    For all their leadership in graphics, they seem to have trouble keeping up with the pace of innovation on Linux in general, especially with their kernel modules not compiling (ATI has the same problem with their Catalyst drivers).
                    Last edited by allquixotic; 10 March 2012, 01:33 AM.

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