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DRI3 Performance Tuning For VMware's VMWGFX Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 6 May 2017 at 09:46 AM EDT. 2 Comments

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware has sent out a series of patches to correct the performance when DRI3 (Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3) is enabled for virtual drivers such as their VMWGFX Gallium3D driver.

DRI3 is turning on some extensions by default that can hurt the performance of virtual (non-hardware) drivers. This in turn decreases performance and increases latency.

The behavioral changes by Hellstrom support for turning off GLX_EXT_buffer_age and GLX_OML_sync_control as two of the extensions not ideal for virtual drivers. The patch then adds vmwgfx to drirc to turn off these two GLX extensions for GNOME Shell.

The patch series for users of VMware's virtual 3D driver stack can be found on Mesa-dev.

2 Comments

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.