The state of GFX virtualization using virglrenderer
In this blog post Corentin Noël, Dmitrii Osipenko, Igor Torrente, and Gert Wollny look at the latest updates around the different approaches to GFX virtualization with virglrenderer.
GFX virtualization aims at providing support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics in virtual machines. Unlike GPU-passthrough, with GFX virtualization the host and all VM guests can access the host GPU simultaneously.
Vulkan and OpenGL are supported by virglrenderer using various approaches: Venus offers virtualized support for Vulkan, OpenGL can make use of VirGL or Zink, the latter of which translates to Vulkan to be handled by Venus. These approaches have the advantage that the guest OS doesn't need to provide specific drivers for the used host hardware. Instead Mesa 3D provides the virgl and zink gallium drivers for the respective OpenGL drivers, and the Vulkan driver named virtio that is also known as Venus.
The requirements for the guest OS are that it runs a kernel that has VirtIO enabled and Mesa 3D with the respective drivers compiled in.
