Tracking Mesa's VirGL OpenGL Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Tracking Mesa's VirGL OpenGL Features

It's now much easier tracking the state of VirGL that allows for OpenGL acceleration within guest virtual machines by passing on the rendering calls to the system's host OpenGL driver via Mesa and the virglrenderer library...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VirGL-OpenGL-Features-List

[Creak]

Well, I'll need to change mesamatrix code in order to parse the new driver (but I'm in vacation in another country right now, so might take some days before I get to it). But it's definitely in my high priority todo list!

Edit: It was easier than anticipated, it's done!

[shmerl]

Edit: It was easier than anticipated, it's done!

I see it now lists Vulkan. Is it still WIP? It shows 0% there.

[starshipeleven]

I see it now lists Vulkan. Is it still WIP? It shows 0% there.

development started 27 march. It's probably too soon to talk about it working at all.

[kobblestown]

So, how do I try it out without recompiling code? Same for VT-g, or whatever the name is these days.

[starshipeleven]

So, how do I try it out without recompiling code? Same for VT-g, or whatever the name is these days.

https://virgil3d.github.io/

Current status

• Kernel Linux 4.2 contains the modesetting only drivers. Linux 4.4 contains the 3D supported pieces.
• Mesa Mesa master contains the virgl 3D driver.
• QEMU QEMU 2.4 contained the initial virtio-gpu with no acceleration support. QEMU 2.5 contains 3D support only with the GTK3 frontend with GL enabled.
• virglrenderer The virglrenderer library seems mostly API stable.

Latest virglrender is 6.0 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/virglrenderer

Find a distro that has all at the right version and install them. Probably Arch or OpenSUSE tumbleweed.

[schmidtbag]

VirGL is now up on mesamatrix.
I figure getting it to feature-completion will be much quicker than other drivers, since (to my understanding) it is basically just an abstraction of "remote" hardware drivers. I hope it can evebtyakkt be compatible with other VMs besides QEMU, as well as pre-built Windows binaries.

I think this could also open a lot of opportunities for various ARM devices. Think of it like this:
Let's say you have a system with closed-source drivers (like the Mali GPUs). You could basically do what Android does, where you have a very basic Linux install with an outdated kernel (for the sake of compatibility with the GPU drivers), and then run a VM with VirGL using the latest software available. What makes this even more interesting is this basically allows your Linux install to be fully portable, which is practically impossible on modern ARM systems.

[shmerl]

Performance on ARM would be bad though. Most ARM SoCs aren't powerful enough for virtualization.

[darkbasic]

The biggest problem with virgil is that you cannot still use it over tcp with spice, only unix sockets and thus local.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Seems like a lot of the commits are coming from Google. Google must have vested interest in harnessing this work for their Project Crostini for Chrome OS.