VMWGFX Enables DRM Render Nodes Support

VMware's VMWgfx virtual graphics driver stack has picked up some new capabilities.

The Linux 3.14 kernel brings a big VMWgfx driver update for its Direct Rendering Manager code. The 33 vmwgfx DRM patches that were merged support the latest revision of VMware's virtual "SVGA2" GPU found within their virtualization software. The driver stack allows for guest virtual machines to have hardware acceleration by passing the OpenGL/2D commands onto the host system for processing by the host's graphics driver/hardware. This latest revision of the "SVGA2" virtual GPU adds a concept of guest-backed objects and resources, as explained in the later article.

Published today on the DRI development mailing list were a set of sixteen patches. In the end the new patches allow PRIME FD reference ioctls and enables DRM render-nodes support.

Initial PRIME support for VMWgfx was published a few months ago while it's the first time the render-nodes support is being enabled for this driver. DRM render-nodes expose GPGPU/compute support and off-screen rendering capabilities that are separated from the display access.