VMware's Virtual GPU Driver Is Still Advancing

While there's usually always something to talk about with each new kernel release for the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau DRM/KMS drivers, that isn't always the case for VMware's "vmwgfx" virtual GPU driver. This driver for exposing 3D acceleration to guest virtual machines on VMware's virtualization products does work quite well already, but the open-source developers have been recently working on a few improvements.

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware has published eight new patches today for their vmwgfx DRM driver that he hopes to see merged for the Linux 3.8 kernel. The patches, which are currently floating on dri-devel, contain various improvements.

Changes include rewritten resource management in preparation for an upcoming hardware version change, easing the implementation of multi-threaded command submission, and pushing out into the public domain a previously internal VMware header file for computing surface memory requirements in the same way as their virtual GPU device.

I'm using VMware Fusion on a daily basis in a production capacity on my main notebook and it works extremely well compared to VirtualBox and its 3D guest driver. Meanwhile, QEMU/KVM/SPICE still lack any proper support for exposing 3D capabilities to guest VMs to then pass the commands onto the host for execution by the host's driver and graphics card.