[Qemu-devel] Introducing Virgil - 3D virtual GPU for qemu

[Qemu-devel] Introducing Virgil - 3D virtual GPU for qemu

[Dave Airlie]

Hey Mesa + qemu lists,

since I suppose these communities would be most interested in this and
might not all read my blog or G+ stream,

"Virgil is a research project I've been working on at Red Hat for a
few months now and I think is ready for at least announcing upstream
and seeing if there is any developer interest in the community in
trying to help out.

The project is to create a 3D capable virtual GPU for qemu that can be
used by Linux and eventually Windows guests to provide OpenGL/Direct3D
support inside the guest. It uses an interface based on Gallium/TGSI
along with virtio to communicate between guest and host, and it goal
is to provided an OpenGL renderer along with a complete Linux driver
stack for the guest.

The website is here with links to some videos:
http://virgil3d.github.io/

some badly formatted Questions/Answers (I fail at github):
http://virgil3d.github.io/questions.html

Just a note and I can't stress this strongly enough, this isn't end
user ready, not even close, it isn't even bleeding edge user ready, or
advanced tester usage ready, its not ready for distro packaging, there
is no roadmap or commitment to finishing it. I don't need you to
install it and run it on your machine and report bugs.

I'm announcing it because there maybe other developers interested or
other companies interested and I'd like to allow them to get on board
at the design/investigation stage, before I have to solidify the APIs
etc. I also don't like single company projects and if I can announcing
early can help avoid that then so be it!

If you are a developer interested in working on an open source virtual
3D GPU, or you work for a company who is interested in developing
something in this area, then get in touch with me, but if you just
want to kick the tyres, I don't have time for this yet."

Dave.

Re: [Qemu-devel] [Mesa-dev] Introducing Virgil - 3D virtual GPU for qemu

[Michael Thayer]

Hello David,

On 18/07/13 08:48, Dave Airlie wrote:
> since I suppose these communities would be most interested in this and
> might not all read my blog or G+ stream,
>
> "Virgil is a research project I've been working on at Red Hat for a
> few months now and I think is ready for at least announcing upstream
> and seeing if there is any developer interest in the community in
> trying to help out.
[...]
> If you are a developer interested in working on an open source virtual
> 3D GPU, or you work for a company who is interested in developing
> something in this area, then get in touch with me, but if you just
> want to kick the tyres, I don't have time for this yet."

Sorry I didn't get round to answering earlier. I have taken a look at 
your code (the Mesa part), and on the whole it looks like something we 
could make good use of too, except that we would want to be producing a 
stream of something closer to OpenGL which we could send over our 
existing proxying mechanisms. Since you put the client and server code 
conveniently close to each other in your clone of the Mesa repository, 
my idea would be to add an build-time option to do this by pulling the 
server-side code into the Gallium driver too - is that something you 
could live with if I wrote code for it? My tendency is to output a 
white-listed subset of OpenGL as a text stream which a custom winsys 
back-end could send into a DRM driver. Regarding your comments on the 
safety of passing OpenGL through, isn't a major part of the risk in the 
shader code anyway, which we can't really not pass through either way?

I would probably not be able to get on to writing the code I mentioned 
above immediately either, as this will not make sense without a proper 
DRM driver which we currently don't have, and which would be my first 
target.  Since this is my first proper visit to that part of the kernel 
code I will probably take a little bit more time for it that you would.

Regards,

Michael
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