Recently we have been talking a lot about VMware's Gallium3D driver that they recently released along with DRM code that does support kernel mode-setting and allows this new 3D driver to function under their virtualization platform. By running this Gallium3D driver on the guest operating system of their VMware virtualization platform, it's possible to leverage the GPU hardware acceleration on the host not only for OpenGL acceleration but for areas of other state tracker coverage like OpenCL, OpenVG, X-Video / X11, and more. This virtual Gallium3D driver really makes things interesting in the virtualization world for the GPU.

VMware designed this Gallium3D driver just for their own software stack, but this company that owns Tungsten Graphics is being good free software contributors with making this code open-source. Red Hat's David Airlie was playing with the vmwgfx KMS driver and in just a few hours managed to get the kernel mode-setting working using QEMU with the VMware SVGA graphics adapter.

With a very simple patch that goes against their vmwgfx kernel driver, David got the kernel mode-setting working for a console. This patch is to actually address bugs that David found within QEMU and the VMware kernel driver, which should go mainline with the Linux 2.6.33 kernel.

Read more on David Airlie's blog.