VMware's SVGA Gallium3D Driver Enables OpenGL 3.3 Compatibility Profile Support

In preparation for the upcoming VMware Fusion 11 and VMware Workstation 15 releases, their Mesa/Gallium3D-based driver stack for Linux guest GPU acceleration has been seeing a variety of updates.

Earlier this month was a big code push including many new features to its "SVGA" Gallium3D driver like MSAA, a various assortment of new OpenGL extensions, and other changes in step with their latest "VMWGFX" Linux kernel DRM drivers.

While VMware's products are not open-source itself, their graphics driver architecture is quite open-source, is mainlined in the various trees, and tends to work out very well for those relying upon Linux guest VMs with an accelerated 2D/3D desktop experience. It's also worthwhile to remind newer Phoronix readers that VMware employs a number of key Mesa contributors including Mesa3D founder Brian Paul following their acquisition many years back of Tungsten Graphics.

The latest now to report on their SVGA Gallium3D driver is supporting OpenGL 3.3 in a compatibility profile context. Up until this week, the compatibility context had only supported OpenGL 3.1. Following recent commits, the version was bumped in Mesa 18.3-dev.