[Spice-devel] OpenGL "passthrough"

[Alon Levy]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2011 at 01:52:12PM +0000, Mosebach  Kai wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Just a though : 
> 
> In a scenario where a kvm-host system has a openGL capable display
> adapter, wouldn't it be possible (and relatively simple compared to a full
> VGA passthrough) to just
> pass the OpenGL interface/access into the VMs QXL Adapter making this one
> (HW accelerated) OpenGL aware?

There are threads in qemu-devel about using pci passthrough for using
the host GPU from the guest. If you actually want to view the results
then yes, it's relatively simple in theory. Maybe also in practice, but
I've been struggling with a slightly larger problem, doing OpenGL and
Direct3D passthrough, for almost a year now, with no results to show :/

I do have patches on my harddrive somewhere by Izik Eidos that do a
proof of concept for GL passthrough from a windows guest to a
windows/linux client, I could ask him if it's ok to post them if you'd
like. (and if I can find them).

Basically it adds qxl messages for all the GL commands, adds a surface
type, tracks all commands from the last SwapBuffers (I guess
wglSwapBuffers - the equivalent of glXSwapBuffers) per surface, and
passes all of those to the client. Rendering on the server, that is the
host, will be a little simpler.

> 
> Thanks for enlightenment,
> 
> Kai
> 
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