VirtIO-GPU Working Towards Vulkan Support, Other Features For Graphics In VMs

As we've known for a long time, VirtIO-GPU / Virgl Vulkan support to allow accelerated Vulkan within virtual machines is in the works but still has a long road ahead. A number of other VirtIO-GPU features are also in the works or at least planning stages.

Linux virtualization developer Gerd Hoffmann laid out some of the VirtIO-GPU happenings. Among the features being pursued are shared mappings to reduce image data copying, blob resources, metadata query for querying host render capabilities/requirements, host memory support to implement coherent memory and other features, and then lastly is the Vulkan support. But it's still likely to be some time until the Vulkan VirtIO-GPU/Virgl support is ready for any end-user usage.

After the open-source Linux virtualization stack was slow to get started for offering accelerated graphics in VMs years later than the likes VirtualBox and VMware, it's nice the support already in place and more mainline improvements coming with time.

More details on the planned features via Gerd's blog.