VirtGL – a lean approach to accelerated 3D graphics Virtualization

DOI: 10.5176/978-981-08-5837-7_144

Authors: A. WeggerleT. Schmitt and C. Löw and C. Himpel and P. Schulthess

Abstract:

Accelerated 3D graphics hardware will typically come with a set of drivers for the Windows operating systems and after some delay drivers are reengineered by the Linux developer community for the respective graphics hardware. The complexity of current graphics hardware and the lack of hardware documentation makes the driver development difficult. Providing native state-of-the-art 3D-graphics support for non-standard OS environments is a herculean task.
The virtualization technology available in high-end PCs now allows reducing the effort to offer accelerated 3D-graphics to guest operating systems in a virtualized environment. The idea is to virtualize the interface to the OpenGL library instead of offering a virtual graphics adapter with its hardware-level programming interface. The advantages of this approach is reduced implementation complexity, a fast implementation track and hardware independence from the perspective of the guest operating system and its OpenGL applications.