Full OpenGL 3D Acceleration for Xen/Vmware/Kvm

Source: Thoughts on the Virtualization area.



With all the news about Vmware Fusion and Parallels upcoming 3D acceleration capabilities there hasn't been much about the free software projects work in this area.

Introducing VMGL, which provides OpenGL Hardware 3D Acceleration for Virtual Machines. It is a program that you install in both the host and guest and allows for virtualizing the OpenGL functions. When tested in xen with Quake 3 & Unreal Tournament 2004 it provides for up to 87% of the performance of the native implementation. It has been tested under vmware and xen but it should work under any of the other virtualization solutions out there. (kvm, qemu, virtual box)

This is major news for the virtualization field as 3D acceleration has been the one area where there has not been much progress. As this is a generic solution released under a BSD licence it can be incorporated into any of the current virtualization solutions. Also it is gpu independent and will work with any OpenGL accelerator.

Promo movie:


Related:
VMGL Homepage
Xen summit Slides