[Mesa-dev] The current status of the gallium vmwgfx driver

[Jakob Bornecrantz]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 1:31 PM, HaiTao Feng <haitao.feng at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Gallium Vmwgfx Developers,
>
> Could I know the current status of the gallium vmwgfx driver? Is it able to
> run Linux guest with OpenGL accelertion?

Yes, I have tested it very recently on Ubuntu 11.10, there are some
bugs especially with Unity, but Compiz run just fine.

>
> I want to try a Linux guest with gallium vmwgfx driver in Vmware player,
> could you give me some instructions on how to build the kernel and mesa
> source code?

The biggest hurdle is setting up the new X driver and getting the
kernel driver sorted. There is some generic build information
http://mesa3d.org/install.html but I would recommend building mesa
with this scons command:

$ scons dri-vmwgfx xorg-vmwgfx

You also need to have a kernel with the vmwgfx driver enabled or build
the standalone driver you can get it from here:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/vmwgfx

then just build that with make, provided you have the kernel headers
for that distribution installed.

$ make

you should be able to insert the new driver into the kernel with
insmod now, recommended that you stop X before doing this and do this
from the terminal.

$ sudo insmod vmwgfx.ko enable_fbdev=1

If you have gotten this far you need to install vmwgfx_drv.so, that
you built in the mesa build above, into /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/
you should now be able to start x again and it will use the new driver
automatically. And finally you need to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf
file (you will probably need to create it first) and add the following
lines

Section "Device"
        Identifier "SVGA Graphics Device"
        Driver "vmware"
        Option "3DAccel" "TRUE"
EndSection

And then restart X again and you should have 3D enabled. I hope this helps.

Cheers Jakob.