Virtualizing The Gallium3D Graphics Stack

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 10 June 2010 at 08:51 PM EDT. 4 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
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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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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