VMware Virtual GPU Driver Gets Fake Page-Flipping

After thoroughly testing the VMware graphics driver stack yesterday and providing benchmarks, there's some new "vmwgfx" developments to report on.

Namely, a patch-set was published to the mailing list that provides fake page-flipping support for the vmwgfx DRM kernel driver for VMware's virtualization platform. "A series of updates that brings in fake pageflipping support and sets initial preferred mode in a way similar to how the legacy Xorg driver does it. We bump minor to indicate availability of the pageflipping ioctl."

Page-flipping with some of the other DRM drivers has resulted in some performance improvements, but more testing will have to be done at Phoronix to see if this yields any improvements for VMware's virtual graphics processor.

Page-flipping is done for flipping the pointer between the front and back-buffers rather than copying the buffer around. Besides the potential performance boost, page-flipping can ensure that tearing doesn't happen assuming that the flipping is done during the vblank.

The other VMware Linux graphics item to point out is that Thomas Hellstrom (one of the VMware developers formerly from Tungsten Graphics) commented in the forums about the expected graphics performance.