Mesa's DRM Library Finally Builds VMWGFX By Default

While VMware's VMWGFX graphics driver has been deemed stable for months, only now with the Mesa DRM library is the driver support being built by default.

In a commit made on Friday to mesa/drm, VMWGFX is now built by default with a commit message of "vmwgfx: No longer experimental...And hasn't been in a long while.." If someone is against the support, at configure-time for building libdrm they can pass the --disable-vmwgfx switch.

Generally speaking, VMware's VMWGFX graphics driver for providing guest 3D support to operating systems being virtualized using VMware products is top-notch and the best among the available open or closed-source solutions. VMware's virtualization products are proprietary, but their VMWGFX virtual GPU driver is fully open-source and based upon Gallium3D and DRM/KMS with mainline drivers.

Just a few days ago the most recent VMware OpenGL benchmarks were published on Phoronix: VMware Virtualization With OpenGL Still Smacks Oracle VirtualBox.

Yesterday did mark the libdrm 2.4.39 release, but sadly this VMWGFX commit came in just a bit too late for this most recent release. The libdrm 2.4.39 release has initial PRIME import/export support for Radeon, an Intel fix, and a few Radeon fixes.