Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Disables 3D Acceleration For Guest VMs With GNOME Boxes / Virt-Manager

In addition to Ubuntu 22.04 switching back NVIDIA to using X11 by default rather than Wayland as a launch-day change, separately, there was another rather notable last minute change affecting 3D support for virtual machines... Those with Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and launching Ubuntu 22.04 desktop VMs will find 3D acceleration disabled by default.

It was just back on 14 April that the Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" osinfo-db package was updated where it added the Ubuntu 22.04 entries and also decided to enable (experimental) 3D acceleration for recent Debian and Ubuntu desktop installs.

One week prior to release, that change enabled 3D acceleration by default when installing recent Debian/Ubuntu desktop operating systems from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts. The osinfo-db is used by the likes of GNOME Boxes and Virt-Manager.

Once again, the open-source Linux 3D graphics driver stack showed its warts. This week prior to releasing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, that change was disabled for having 3D acceleration by default set in osinfo-db. It was found running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian testing guests were leading to black screens under the likes of GNOME Boxes and Virt-Manager.

There is this bug report around the broken log-in for VMs and seems to attribute it at least in part to Wayland while other indications are a broken VirtIO driver. With Ubuntu developers not immediately sure what is happening, they resorted to reverting their change from the prior week. For being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 22.04 seems to have had more than usual notable last-minute changes.

In any event the shipping osinfo-db on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS at least for now is disabling that 3D feature for Ubuntu guest virtual machines.