VirtIO-GPU Gets Patches For 3D Rendering

Landing in the Linux 4.2 kernel was the new VirtIO GPU driver to be used with the open-source Linux virtualization stack as the first step towards having open-source GPU hardware acceleration in guest VMs. While that initial code drop didn't hook up any 3D rendering support, there's now patches for doing just that.

David Airlie's Virgil project is finally coming to fruition for providing open-source 3D/GPU acceleration to guests within Red Hat's open-source virtualization world. The VirtIO DRM GPU driver will come into play along with new Mesa/Gallium3D code and there's also needed updates to QEMU.

Published on Wednesday by Red Hat's Gerd Hoffmann is the landing of the VirtIO-GPU DRM changes for supporting 3D rendering. There's also been the posted needed QEMU patches. The newly-posted DRM patches add basic PRIME support, mark VirtGPU as a render GPU, and make the other needed changes to get things going on the kernel side. In total it's around 1,500 lines of new code.

The new DRM patches can be found on dri-devel while the QEMU patches are on their list. The OpenGL rendering support option is exposed in QEMU to the SDL2 and GTK user-interfaces.

Let's hope the kernel-side work will be in good shape for landing in Linux 4.4 so open-source Linux virtualization can finally moving towards the world of having 3D GPU guest support to compete with the offerings from VirtualBox and VMware.