QXL Virtual Graphics Driver Hits New Milestone

A major release of the QXL X.Org graphics driver for virtualized environments has been made available and it's packing many changes.

The xf86-video-qxl driver is the DDX/X.Org graphics driver for the QXL Virtual GPU. This is used with the QEMU para-virtualized guests where the QXL Virtual GPU is exposed via SPICE, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization System.

The xf86-video-qxl 0.1.0 release offers several dozen changes including RENDER support, 8-bit pixmaps, improved support for memory debugging, and much more.

The release announcement for the QXL X.Org driver release can be found on the mailing list.

While there are plans to eventually have a Gallium3D QXL driver for 3D/OpenGL support to QEMU guest virtual machines, there hasn't been any major public-facing activity on this front yet. Hopefully it will end up materializing soon since the lack of 3D guest hardware acceleration support remains one of the blemishes to open-source virtualization compared to the proprietary offerings like VMware and VirtualBox.