VMware SVGA Graphics Driver Switches To NIR By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VMware SVGA Graphics Driver Switches To NIR By Default

VMware's SVGA Gallium3D driver that provides OpenGL support within guest virtual machines running with VMware virtualization products is now finally defaulting to using the modern NIR intermediate representative rather than Gallium3D's TGSI...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/VMware-SVGA-NIR-Default

[caligula]

What about the VirtualBox vboxvga driver?

[ehansin]

What about the VirtualBox vboxvga driver?

VirtualBox has the VMSVGA emulated adapter. Per Super User, "this emulates the VMware Workstation graphics adapter with the 'VMware SVGA 3D' acceleration method."
(https://superuser.com/questions/1403...-in-virtualbox)

How all these pieces fit together and how the Mesa driver works with this is all over my head. But figured I'd mention, is the emulated display adapter I use on Linux VirtualBox guest installations.

[caligula]

VirtualBox has the VMSVGA emulated adapter. Per Super User, "this emulates the VMware Workstation graphics adapter with the 'VMware SVGA 3D' acceleration method."

How all these pieces fit together and how the Mesa driver works with this is all over my head. But figured I'd mention, is the emulated display adapter I use on Linux VirtualBox guest installations.

Yea but Virtualbox insists on compiling their own vboxvga and it's the default video driver when you import a VM. It's included in their guest utils. They don't want to donate the code to upstream. There's a guy called Hans de Goede who apparently tried to include vboxvga in the mainline kernel, but Oracle does not think it's a good idea. They ship their own incompatible driver. AFAIK it's not even compatible with the vmware xorg driver.

[zeehio]

I thought I needed proprietary VirtualBox to easily create a VM with Linux. I wanted to try a free alternative and I found out my distribution (Debian based) already has in their repositories https://virt-manager.org/, which was more than enough for me.

I'm saying this just in case you are a VM user who thinks VirtualBox is the only viable option (as I thought until last year). In my experience it has been worth a try.

[Quackdoc]

What about the VirtualBox vboxvga driver?

vbox perf is trash anyways, now that virgl is working under windows hosts (perf is trash on AMD LOL and zink/d3d12 don't work at least for android) I highly reccomend just using vmware or qemu. you can also use hyper-v if you are fine with compiling your own kernel and sideloading the d3d12 bits, this is decently better preformance then virgl, but will still be less perf then venus/gfxstream whenever they get supported