The Current Performance Of Virgl3D, Future Plans

Last week at XDC2018 in Spain, Elie Tournier of Collabora presented on the current state of the Virgl effort for allowing OpenGL acceleration provided by a host's system within a QEMU/VirtIO-GPU virtual machine environment.

For the most part the information is what most Phoronix readers should be already familiar with if you stay up to date with our news coverage... In recent months Virgl has gone from only supporting OpenGL 3.0 to now supporting OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.2, assuming the host driver supports the necessary bits too. The OpenGL ES support has required some workarounds to get it working.

One of the interesting bits shared was the current state of the performance, which is based on this mailing list post from September beginning to explore the performance:

It's better than no hardware acceleration, but any GL/GLES intensive workload will generally strain Virgl. Besides improving the performance, other plans for this project include addressing current Piglit and conformance test suite failures, better security, and coherent memory support.

There is also the work-in-progress Vulkan support for Virgl started via this year's Google Summer of Code but that is currently in a very early state.

Tournier's slide deck from XDC2018 can be viewed here (PDF).