Re: [Xen-devel] [Spice-devel] Developers for virgl 3d windows guest support

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@xxxxxxxxxx>]

  Hi,

> About virtio-gpu using virgl3d project for 3d hw acceleration support 
> and is what I mainly watching for its large gpu choice/support, seems 
> any gpu that have a drm driver in host kernel is supported by virgl, or 
> I'm wrong?

You need a mesa driver too.  But, yes, pretty much any modern hardware
with opengl supported by open source drivers should do.

> Intel cpus with integrated gpu that support igvt-g don't seems powerful 
> enough for major of servers I need to build (about xeon only workstation 
> series seems support it).

FYI:  Any broadwell + newer should do for intel-vgpu, long-term.
current experimental code releases include haswell too, but intel
doesn't plan to upstream that.

> I'm wondering what solution is more long-term reliable and approceable 
> to have such 2d/3d support and FWIK ity seems virgl is the way to go but 
> i really need some advice from some expert out there in order to make 
> the right choice.

I expect intel-vgpu and virgl both will be upstreamed at some point and
should work fine without too much hassle.

Intel has the advantage that windows drivers exist already, for virgl
they need to be written.

Intel has the disadvantage that it only works on newer intel hardware,
virgl works pretty much anywhere.  If you havn't yet ordered the
hardware this might not be much of a problem though.

But also note that being hardware-independent doesn't come for free,
there is some translation overhead involved.  When comparing intel-vgpu
and virgl on the same hardware intel will most likely deliver higher
performance.

> available (virgl or other that I'm not aware of).

Well, there is https://github.com/espes/xqemu/blob/xbox/hw/xbox/nv2a.c

Didn't have the time yet to look at this in detail, it's on my TODO list
though.

It is opengl-accelerated geforce nv2a emulation.  For an older qemu
version.  Plumbing that into opengl infrastructure qemu got recently for
virgl shouldn't be too hard.  Advantage of emulating something existing
is that the guest driver problem goes away.  Disavdantage of course is
that you are limited to what the emulated hardware is able to do (not
sure what level of opengl the nv2a is able to support).  Could be useful
for desktop workloads nevertheless.

Bottom line: lots of tradeoffs here, and also alot of work-in-progress
stuff ...

cheers,
  Gerd


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