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

[Feng, Haitao]

Hi Jakob,

Thank you very much for your reply!

I have tried your method and other method from VMware community
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1544516 to build vmwgfx in Ununtu
11.04. I have found that:

I could build vmwgfx and glxinfo shows "Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D; build:
RELEASE" on Windows 7 by:

1) Build the kernel with "CONFIG_DRM_VMWGFX=m" (source is from "apt-get
source linux-image-2.6.38-8-generic", .config from
/boot/config-2.6.38-8-generic) 
2) Build the drm by configuring "--enable-vmwgfx-experimental-api" 
3) Build the mesa by configuring "--enable-gallium-svga" 
4) Manually modified /etc/X11/xorg.conf to set 3DAccel "True"

glxgears works, while gnome-panel does not show up and there are
other drawing errors in the screen.

On Linux, it seems that 3D acceleration is disabled in VMWare Player.

By using the "insmod ./vmwgfx.ko enable_fbdev=1", I did not get SVGA3D
enabled, glxinfo still shows "Software Rasterizer", while vmwgfx_dri is
loaded seen in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

It seems I need to read the source codes to understand why vmwgfx_dri.so
is loaded while glxinfo still shows up "Software Rasterizer". Do you
have any recommendation to understand the codes faster?

Thanks
-Haitao

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 08:10:03AM +0800, Jakob Bornecrantz wrote:
> 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.
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