[Spice-devel] Windows 10 guest: 2D/3D Accel

[Frediano Ziglio]

There's a bit of confusion. 

The VM sees which cards the hypervisor (Qemu in this case) is configured to provide. As 
any card GPUs can be 
1) physical, fully virtual 
2) paravirtual 
3) pass-through, specifically: 
3.1) full pass-through 
3.2) function pass-through 

1) like VGA, a physical card is fully emulated, quite slow, there are 
some cards which are better than others as requires less guest <-> hypervisor 
switches; 
2) there are no physical card, the card is created just for virtual environment. 
This reduce the switches guest <-> hypervisor and optimized a lot of functions. 
Virgl cards, like QXL or VirtIO cards are like that. Are much more efficient 
and allows lot of features provided by virtual environment (like suspend 
or migration). The "best" for Qemu and 3d is surely Virgl but as said there's 
no Windows drivers at the moment; 
3) you pass a full physical card or part of it. This CAN'T be used by the host 
and reduce control not allowing (usually) suspend and migration; 
3.1) basically an entire physical card is passed to the guest. If you have an additional 
GPU (graphical card) you can do it; 
3.2) some cards allow to provide part of its functions to be assigned like 
if were a physical card. For GPU currently Qemu/KVM does not provide 
much. Work is going to support Intel solutions and Nvidia ones. 
Nvidia ones are usually quite expensive (cards do not fit in either laptops 
or even desktops) while Intel offers some really cheap solutions using a 
mix of hardware/software solution. 

Frediano 

> Hi Christophe,

> Thanks a lot for your clarifications... can you help me with the other
> questions?

> Is there any way to check if is it using client GPU or host CPU?

> Is there any Grpahics card to be plugged in the host in order to use host
> GPU?

> thanks a lot.

> 2017-05-09 12:03 GMT+02:00 Christophe Fergeau < cfergeau at redhat.com > :

> > Hey,
> 

> > On Tue, May 09, 2017 at 10:42:31AM +0200, Oscar Segarra wrote:
> 
> > > Hi,
> 
> > >
> 
> > > What kind of drivers are required in windows? (I supose you mean Windows
> 
> > > guest).
> 

> > A video driver able to use virtio-gpu + virgl would be needed, but does
> 
> > not exist at the moment. This is one of the Google Summer of Code
> 
> > projects for this year though.
> 

> > Christophe
> 
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