Virtual GEM To Increase Mesa's Software Rasterizer Performance

A Google engineer is still working on his virtual GEM driver that will benefit the performance of Mesa's software rasterizer for increasing the performance when not running on real graphics hardware.

It's been talked about before to make a fake DRM/GEM driver to enhance the performance of Mesa's Softpipe/LLVMpipe drivers while Zach Reizner of Google has been the one taking action recently on making it a reality.

The vGEM DRM driver is a virtual GEM driver with PRIME sharing and allows vGEM to import a GEM object from other drivers to mmap them to user-space. This virtual graphics memory manager can be used by Mesa's software rasterizer for enhanced performance.

Version 2 of the vGEM driver was published on Friday and amounts to just over 500 lines as a new DRM kernel driver. The driver in its current form can be found on the dri-devel list. Hopefully vGEM will get ready for merging into an upcoming Linux kernel release to benefit those running (or just testing) on the software rasterizer.