The VirGL Virtual OpenGL Renderer Is Growing Up

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 15 February 2016 at 08:48 AM EST. 16 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
The VirGL Virtual OpenGL Renderer -- a.k.a. Virglrenderer -- is growing up and getting ready for primetime.

The VirGL renderer has been mainlined through various parts of the stack with QEMU 2.5, Mesa 11.1, and Linux 4.4.

With VirGL renderer slowly becoming available to more Linux users as a way to have 3D acceleration within guest QEMU-based VMs using a fully open-source stack (unlike VirtualBox and VMware), this target is becoming very interesting. With getting ready, David Airlie has now launched a Virglrenderer mailing list to discuss the development of this renderer.

There is also now a proper Virglrenderer Git repository rather than the development just continuing to happen in Airlie's own repository.

I've been planning to do some VirGL renderer benchmarks with some upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 or Fedora 24 snapshots since all of the pieces should be landed in the next round of distribution updates and hopefully any early fallout addressed by that time. Stay tuned.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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