Test Driving The QEMU-KVM KMS Driver

While not as pleasant as an accelerated guest using VMware (I use VMware Fusion daily on my main system), using the Cirrus KMS driver made using the GNOME desktop on the guest feel more responsive and snappier than the default Ubuntu 10.10 experience. At no time during this initial testing was the experience worse than before nor was the DRM driver unstable or causing any other problems.

Tests like GtkPerf, QGears2, and Render-Bench were not able to capture any measurable changes in performance, unfortunately, since there isn't much to the driver. The CPU usage of using the Cirrus KVM KMS driver on the guest was slightly higher in some operations than with just the DDX, but nothing to cause any real concern.

This KMS driver targeting QEMU-KVM will likely be merged into the Linux 2.6.40 kernel.