Red Hat Is Rolling Out A VirtIO DRM/KMS GPU Driver

Red Hat has published a new KMS driver for the VirtIO GPU used within their Linux virtualization stack.

This new DRM driver that amounts to just over 3,000 lines of code targets the VirtIO GPU and enables the xf86-video-modesetting to be used with this virtual device. There's also QEMU patches under review for supporting this VirtIO GPU setup.

Initially this VirtIO DRM driver just supports 2D while David Airlie's Virgil3D work that's under development and powered using Gallium3D is still under development and will be added later to VirtIO DRM for supporting 3D/OpenGL.

This VirtIO GPU DRM driver is an alternative to the older QXL/SPICE DRM driver and QEMU-targeting Cirrus DRM driver. The new QEMU-based VirtIO GPU driver can be found right now on the kernel mailing list and will hopefully be merged to at least staging for Linux 4.1.