[Mesa-dev] Introducing Virgil - 3D virtual GPU for qemu

[Michael Thayer]

Hello David,

On 18/07/13 08:48, Dave Airlie wrote:
> since I suppose these communities would be most interested in this and
> might not all read my blog or G+ stream,
>
> "Virgil is a research project I've been working on at Red Hat for a
> few months now and I think is ready for at least announcing upstream
> and seeing if there is any developer interest in the community in
> trying to help out.
[...]
> If you are a developer interested in working on an open source virtual
> 3D GPU, or you work for a company who is interested in developing
> something in this area, then get in touch with me, but if you just
> want to kick the tyres, I don't have time for this yet."

Sorry I didn't get round to answering earlier. I have taken a look at 
your code (the Mesa part), and on the whole it looks like something we 
could make good use of too, except that we would want to be producing a 
stream of something closer to OpenGL which we could send over our 
existing proxying mechanisms. Since you put the client and server code 
conveniently close to each other in your clone of the Mesa repository, 
my idea would be to add an build-time option to do this by pulling the 
server-side code into the Gallium driver too - is that something you 
could live with if I wrote code for it? My tendency is to output a 
white-listed subset of OpenGL as a text stream which a custom winsys 
back-end could send into a DRM driver. Regarding your comments on the 
safety of passing OpenGL through, isn't a major part of the risk in the 
shader code anyway, which we can't really not pass through either way?

I would probably not be able to get on to writing the code I mentioned 
above immediately either, as this will not make sense without a proper 
DRM driver which we currently don't have, and which would be my first 
target.  Since this is my first proper visit to that part of the kernel 
code I will probably take a little bit more time for it that you would.

Regards,

Michael
-- 
ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG   Michael Thayer
Werkstrasse 24                     VirtualBox engineering
71384 Weinstadt, Germany           mailto:michael.thayer at oracle.com

Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München
Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603
Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz

Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V.
Hertogswetering 163/167, 3543 AS Utrecht, Niederlande
Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697
Geschäftsführer: Alexander van der Ven, Astrid Kepper, Val Maher