VMWare Updates Its Gallium3D Driver Ahead Of Fusion 11 / Workstation 15

VMware has landed more than fifty Mesa patches today adding a lot of new functionality to its "SVGA" Gallium3D driver that is used for providing OpenGL/GPU acceleration to guest virtual machines with its virtualization products.

This big set of feature work is in preparation for the upcoming VMware Workstation 15 and Fusion 11 product releases. The new features in their SVGA Gallium3D driver require the bits to be found in their Workstation / Fusion product updates.

The work most notably includes (finally) supporting multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) and a number of new OpenGL extensions. Those new features include ARB_draw_buffers_blend, ARB_sample_shading, ARB_texture_cube_map_array, ARB_texture_gather, ARB_texture_query_lod, and EXT_draw_buffers_indexed, among with a few related extensions. This new functionality besides needing VMware Fusion 11 / Workstation 15 also requires using the latest Linux kernel for the VMWGFX DRM driver bits.

VMware users leveraging their open-source SVGA virtual driver stack can find these new Gallium3D driver capabilities in Git ahead of the Mesa 18.3 debut around the end of the year.