VMware's Linux 3D Guest Driver Is Ready

The xf86-video-vmware 12.0 driver was officially released yesterday, which now means all of the components needed for 3D Linux guest acceleration are now available and stable.

The vmwgfx DRM kernel driver left the staging area in the Linux 3.2 kernel, marking it as a point ready for stable production use. The Gallium3D user-space driver for VMware became properly christened in Mesa 8.0 along with the new XA State Tracker for 2D acceleration and other changes. The final piece of the accelerated VMware puzzle is now fitted: the xf86-video-vmware 12.0 DDX driver. (Read VMware's New Graphics Architecture Is Shaping Up.)

From Jakob Bornecrantz and his release announcement, "Full release of the new vmwgfx enabled driver bringing 3D to Linux guest on VMware products."

This new DDX driver release is also compatible with this week's release of X.Org Server 1.12.

For full details about their new Gallium3D-based graphics driver acceleration stack, which exposes hardware acceleration to guest VMs on VMware's virtualization platform, read and see the performance benchmarks in VMware's Virtual GPU Driver Is Running Fast. VMware's implementation is much better than Oracle's 3D VirtualBox alternative.