The VirGL Virtual OpenGL Renderer Is Growing Up

The VirGL Virtual OpenGL Renderer -- a.k.a. Virglrenderer -- is growing up and getting ready for primetime.

The VirGL renderer has been mainlined through various parts of the stack with QEMU 2.5, Mesa 11.1, and Linux 4.4.

With VirGL renderer slowly becoming available to more Linux users as a way to have 3D acceleration within guest QEMU-based VMs using a fully open-source stack (unlike VirtualBox and VMware), this target is becoming very interesting. With getting ready, David Airlie has now launched a Virglrenderer mailing list to discuss the development of this renderer.

There is also now a proper Virglrenderer Git repository rather than the development just continuing to happen in Airlie's own repository.

I've been planning to do some VirGL renderer benchmarks with some upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 or Fedora 24 snapshots since all of the pieces should be landed in the next round of distribution updates and hopefully any early fallout addressed by that time. Stay tuned.