A Virtual Gallium3D Driver Coming For VMware

For months Sun's VirtualBox virtualization software picked up OpenGL and Direct3D acceleration support for virtualized guest operating systems, but now 2D/3D hardware-acceleration support for those running operating systems under VMware's virtualization products are imminent.

It was almost one year ago that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, but now their motives behind that acquisition are becoming more clear. Being hosted at VMware's headquarters today in Palo Alto, California was a Gallium3D Workshop, where various open-source Mesa developers are currently at and others connecting remotely.

At this workshop it has just been announced that a "virtual" GPU driver for Tungsten's Gallium3D driver architecture will soon be publicly released. This Gallium3D driver that will be able to run within VMware guests should be quite interesting, since thanks to the design of Gallium3D, will be able to leverage the existing state trackers.

In other words, VMware guests soon will be able to have accelerated access to OpenGL (2.1 currently, but an OpenGL 3 state tracker is being worked on), OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, OpenVG, and OpenCL. Other state trackers for Gallium3D are surely on the way as well. With Microsoft Windows guests being quite common on VMware platforms, perhaps soon Tungsten Graphics / VMware will be even release a public Direct3D state tracker.

A Gallium3D driver in a virtualized environment has extremely interesting potential. More information is on the way about this virtual Gallium3D driver. We will also have other news from VMware's Gallium3D workshop taking place today.