Virtualizing The Gallium3D Graphics Stack

Nearly two months ago we first reported on the Gallium3D driver that few knew about in the form of a Gallium3D driver that targeted the Xen virtualization platform similar to what VMware now does with its virtual Gallium3D driver for offering hardware accelerate on guest operating systems via Gallium3D. Over a number of months last year was this new Gallium3D driver, which now there is more information.

As part of the work done by the Open Trusted Computing project is a fork of Gallium3D v0.1. Though as it's now the early hours of the morning in Berlin where LinuxTag is taking place this week, here's the important details from the new mailing list message.

Between Oct 2008 and May 2009, I developed a remoting Gallium driver for the Open Trusted Computing project, intended for allowing guest virtual machines to perform accelerated rendering, similar to Chromium, VMGL, or VMWare's proprietary remoting technology. In a nutshell, it runs state trackers in the guest, and multiplexes them onto a pipe driver which can access hardware.

Its goals were to provide reasonably secure, but still performant, rendering. The codebase was produced from a fork of the gallium-0.1 branch of the Mesa repository, circa October 2008, and as a result it's no longer compatible with Mesa tip; however, bringing it up to date doesn't look as if it would be too hard.

I wrote it to work with the softpipe driver initially, as at the time the only complete Gallium hardware driver was for the i915, which I didn't posess. However again getting it working with other pipes shouldn't be too hard.

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