Mesa's Virgl Straps On A Simple Disk Cache

The "Virgl" virtual 3D GPU project for providing OpenGL (and work-in-progress VirtIO-GPU Vulkan) acceleration within guest virtual machines continues to mature for improving the open-source Linux desktop virtualization stack.

The latest Virgl addition worth mentioning on the Mesa side is the introduction of a simple disk cache. Stéphane Marchesin of Google has created a simple front-end disk cache for Virgl.

With Virgl relying upon the host's native OpenGL drivers, this is just a front-end disk cache. However, even with just caching to disk the uncompiled shaders, it's still a performance win. It's useful enough that Marchesin found during testing with using a Portal 2 APITrace the performance jumped from 100 FPS to 129 FPS.

This Virgl disk cache was merged today for Mesa 21.1.