Virgl Adds Accelerated Video Encoding To Guest VMs

Mesa VirGL with the virglrenderer library has allowed for virtual 3D GPU support within QEMU virtual machines. This Gallium3D-leveraging code has allowed for OpenGL and other functionality to work within VMs while leveraging the host's GPU. The latest notable addition is adding VirGL video encoding support with H.264 and H.265 initially being supported for accelerated support in VMs.

Developers from the Chinese company Kylinsoft / Kylin OS worked on this VirGL video support for both the Mesa and Virglrenderer code changes. So far just H.264 and H.265/HEVC video encoding is supported.

With the necessary software bits in place, this allows QEMU virtual machines to have GPU-accelerated video encoding for multimedia software supporting the VA-API interface. The virtio_gpu VA-API driver is used and provides for faster video encode, such as with FFmpeg. This support so far has been tested with both Intel and AMD Radeon GPUs for the host and their respective Linux drivers.

The Virglrenderer support was merged recently while the Mesa VirGL H.264/H.265 code landed today for next quarter's Mesa 23.0 release.