Getting Experimental Vulkan Within QEMU VMs Using Linux 5.16+ Paired With Mesa's Venus

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Getting Experimental Vulkan Within QEMU VMs Using Linux 5.16+ Paired With Mesa's Venus

When running on the very latest Linux 5.16 Git kernel paired with recent Mesa and various experimental components to the virtualization stack, it is possible getting at least basic Vulkan acceleration working within QEMU guest virtual machines that in turn is accelerated by the host...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-Venus-QEMU-Guests

[landeel]

Vulkan / dxvk on Windows guests would be a huge game changer.

[ehansin]

I have been thinking it would be great to have a tiling window manager (e.g. Sway) based Linux installation, and then just run Windows virtualized on one of the virtual desktops in the WM. This would allow me to do what I need to do for work stuff or anything else that is Windows only, while still having Linux as a primary desktop. Does anyone know how close we are to having something like this work with pretty decent Windows guest performance? I do run Windows guests with Virtual Box on Windows hosts (needed as a dedicated install for AD access.) Works okay, but clearly some issues. Anyway, the Linux host running a Windows guest with something more "native" (and lightweight) to Linux than Virtual Box would be cool. Is anyone in the know if this something that may continue to improve going forward? I assume the more pass-through stuff that happens the better. Thanks!

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Additionally, the kernel must be built with UDMABUF emabled.

[Chewi]

Could this be combined with Zink? Would it maybe provide better performance than GL passthrough?

[evasb]

Linux guests are not exiting anymore. Wake me up when we have accelerated Windows guests.

[Xaero_Vincent]

LibVF.IO seems pretty interesting for shared GPU multiplexing.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Vulkan / dxvk on Windows guests would be a huge game changer.

VMware Workstation/Player has this at least for OpenGL and DX9 thru 11. Not Vulkan API support at the guest level yet AFAIK though.

[landeel]

VMware Workstation/Player has this at least for OpenGL and DX9 thru 11. Not Vulkan API support at the guest level yet AFAIK though.

Yes, but performance is really bad. Most games that run fine on bare metal are unplayable on VM.

[rabcor]

This is very cool, but meaningless to the average user until it's compatible with windows guests.