The Current Performance Of Virgl3D, Future Plans

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Current Performance Of Virgl3D, Future Plans

Last week at XDC2018 in Spain, Elie Tournier of Collabora presented on the current state of the Virgl effort for allowing OpenGL acceleration provided by a host's system within a QEMU/VirtIO-GPU virtual machine environment...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Virgl-XDC-2018

[cybertraveler]

It sounds like it will be practical for providing GPU acceleration to desktops running inside virtual machines.

Will this likely get seemlessly integrated with QEMU and VirtualBox?

[AndyChow]

It sounds like it will be practical for providing GPU acceleration to desktops running inside virtual machines.

Will this likely get seemlessly integrated with QEMU and VirtualBox?

It's been available in QEMU for a while. If starting QEMU directly, you just add the option "gl=on" ("-display sdl,gl=on") to your command line. I never got it to work with virt-manager or virsh, but honestly I haven't tried that hard. Works flawlessly when directly using qemu.

As for VirtualBox, I doubt it.

[bridgman]

That's pretty decent performance. The big question is not so much "will it run Heaven" as "will it run an accelerated desktop and typical apps".

I didn't get to see the demo but at first glance this seems very promising.

[cybertraveler]

It's been available in QEMU for a while. If starting QEMU directly, you just add the option "gl=on" ("-display sdl,gl=on") to your command line. I never got it to work with virt-manager or virsh, but honestly I haven't tried that hard. Works flawlessly when directly using qemu.

As for VirtualBox, I doubt it.

Thanks.

How have you found the performance, appearance and stability? What applications or desktop environments have you used that have exercised the OpenGL acceleration?

[darkbasic]

Will this likely get seemlessly integrated with QEMU and VirtualBox?

Unfortunately at the current state VirGL is almost useless, because it supports only Unix sockets on Spice instead of TCP sockets. That means that you can use it only on the same machine you're running the server on.

[pal666]

Unfortunately at the current state VirGL is almost useless, because it supports only Unix sockets on Spice instead of TCP sockets. That means that you can use it only on the same machine you're running the server on.

you are not aware of remote desktop in 2018?

[AndyChow]

Thanks.

How have you found the performance, appearance and stability? What applications or desktop environments have you used that have exercised the OpenGL acceleration?

In my experience, works great. I've mostly done simple things. Like Manjaro in a VM, without Virgil it kept going into software rendering mode.

Performance-wise, looking at the chart in the article, I'd say 1/3rd of bare-metal sounds about right.

I haven't tried it myself, but there's a snap package that has everything included called qemu-virgil. Seems the commands are the same as qemu, but you just start the command with qemu-virgil instead of qemu. For those that don't like headaches.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Getting this working well will probably be of much interest to Google for it's Linux support with chromebooks as it's Linux is a containerized VM based partly on QEMU technologies.

[AndyChow]

Getting this working well will probably be of much interest to Google for it's Linux support with chromebooks as it's Linux is a containerized VM based partly on QEMU technologies.

Are you talking about Crouton? Because from what I understand, it's more of a chroot type of deal. A little bit like LXC, it runs on the same kernel, and just isolates what's running. It's not a virtualization similar to QEMU. QEMU is more of an emulator really, and QEMU with KVM is an emulated software-defined platform where the cpu is actually the real cpu exposed by calling the processors virtualization instruction set.