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VirGL is a virtual 3D GPU for use inside QEMU virtual machines, that
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allows the guest operating system to use the capabilities of the host GPU
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to accelerate 3D rendering. The plan is to have a guest GPU that is fully
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independent of the host GPU.
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What exactly does it entail?
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----------------------------
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The project entails creating a virtual 3D capable graphics card for
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virtual machines running inside QEMU. The design of this card is based
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around the concepts of Gallium3D to make writing Mesa and (eventually)
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Direct3D drivers for it easy. The card natively uses the Gallium TGSI
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intermediate representation for its shaders. The implementation of
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rendering for the card is done in the host system as part of QEMU and is
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implemented purely on OpenGL so you can get accelerated rendering on any
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sufficiently capable card/driver combination.
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The project also consists of a complete Linux guest stack, composed of a
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Linux kernel KMS driver, X.org 2D DDX driver and Mesa 3D driver.
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* Many pieces are now upstreamed in various projects.
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* Kernel Linux 4.2 contains the modesetting only drivers. Linux 4.4
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contains the 3D supported pieces.
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* Mesa main contains the virgl 3D driver.
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* QEMU 2.4 contained the initial virtio-gpu with no acceleration
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support. QEMU 2.5 contains 3D support only with the GTK3 frontend with
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* The virglrenderer library seems mostly API stable.
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* Limited environment renderer (GLES2)
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So what can it do now?
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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Run a desktop and most 3D games I've thrown at it.
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The project is currently investigating the desktop virtualisation use case
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only. This use case is where the viewer, host and guest are all running on
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the same machine (i.e. workstation or laptop). Some areas are in scope for
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future investigation but not being looked at, at this time.
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* Remoting rendering using a codec solution.
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* Windows guest, Direct3D drivers.
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* Passing through GPUs or subsets of GPU capabilities.
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All upstream parts are being developed upstream.
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virglrenderer: the GL renderer https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/virgl/virglrenderer
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Authors and Contributors
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------------------------
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VirGL is a project undertaken by Dave Airlie at Red Hat. It builds on lots
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of open source work in a number of projects, primarily the Gallium 3D code
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from the Mesa project.
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mailing list: virglrenderer-devel@lists.freedesktop.org
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https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/virglrenderer-devel
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irc: `#virgil3d on OFTC <irc://irc.oftc.net/virgil3d>`__.