DRI3 Performance Tuning For VMware's VMWGFX Driver

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware has sent out a series of patches to correct the performance when DRI3 (Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3) is enabled for virtual drivers such as their VMWGFX Gallium3D driver.

DRI3 is turning on some extensions by default that can hurt the performance of virtual (non-hardware) drivers. This in turn decreases performance and increases latency.

The behavioral changes by Hellstrom support for turning off GLX_EXT_buffer_age and GLX_OML_sync_control as two of the extensions not ideal for virtual drivers. The patch then adds vmwgfx to drirc to turn off these two GLX extensions for GNOME Shell.

The patch series for users of VMware's virtual 3D driver stack can be found on Mesa-dev.