Re: [Qemu-devel] approaches to 3D virtualisation

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Sun, 13 Dec 2009, Mark Williamson wrote:
> There may be an option c) in existence.  The OpenTC project (EU funded) 
> included a secure UI project and part of that involved a prototype 
> paravirtualised 3D driver.  It was done primarily by a research assistant at 
> Cambridge University Computer Lab and basically added a paravirtual GPU 
> device 
> that essentially proxied Gallium-level commands across a shared memory 
> transport.
> 
> There's a short paper on the work here, it was implemented for Xen but I 
> doubt 
> it's that Xen-specific:
> http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_oracle09/xensummit_chris.pdf
> 
> I think there's a longer paper that might be available somewhere.
> 
> I assume this is similar to the VMware approach, however as implemented it 
> did 
> require a Gallium 3D stack available on the host also in order to actually 
> render the stuff.  ISTR the guy who worked on it mentioning that VMware may 
> have implemented a Gallium->high level 3D API translator on the host side 
> instead, since most hosts aren't using Gallium drivers yet.
> 
> The main reason I mention this is that I *thought* the code was meant to be 
> open sourced, in which case it might at least be an interesting starting 
> point.  I'm not quite sure where it *is* though!
> 

Yes, the code is available somewhere and might be a good starting point;
I can retrieve it if you guys are really interested.
However you should be aware that the Windows drivers are completely
missing in this case too.

I think this discussion is really interesting and it should be
split it in two parts: the VGPU interface with 3d support,
and 3d remoting.
Both are difficult topics to discuss and both can (should?) be used
independently from one another: a VGPU infrastructure can be used to
render guest 3d commands on the host (see the VMware paper); 3d remoting
can be used on native too.

I am curious about the VMware MKS thread mentioned in the paper, that is
the backend that receives rendering requests from the guest and executes
them on the host: is that available somewhere?
If it is closed source and cannot be reused for Qemu\KVM\Xen, we might
as well design our own VGPU interface as we like.