[Spice-devel] Offload pixel encoding via Virgil

[Frediano Ziglio]

> Thank you Victor, I had the impression the OpenGL implementation was complete
> for Windows OS.
> I guess then the question in general, will the spice codec use opengl
> acceleration, if available, to reduce CPU overhead when rendering 2D only
> full screen refreshes?

> On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 1:48 AM Victor Toso < victortoso at redhat.com > wrote:

> > Hi,
> 

> > On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 05:15:01PM -0700, Benjamin Kingston wrote:
> 
> > > Hello,
> 
> > >
> 
> > > Is it possible to increase guest density by offloading the
> 
> > > pixel codec in the guests to a common onboard GPU?
> 
> > >
> 
> > > In other words, does the Spice Agent, particularly in Windows
> 
> > > 10, leverage OpenGL or other Virgil features to reduce CPU load
> 
> > > when full screen refreshing is taking place?
> 
> > >
> 
> > > Thanks,
> 
I think there is a bit of confusion. Virgl support is about using a virtual card 
(VirtIO-vga) supporting 3D making possible to use host capabilities for 3D rendering. 
Does not only help for "full screen refreshing". 
The spice agent, either standard one (vdagent) and streaming one are not involved in this 
acceleration. The vdagent is not involved at all during rendering and is there to manage 
clipboard, copy&paste, mouse, screen resize and other stuff. The streaming agent is 
intended to be used in pass-through/vGPU cases where the physical GPU (pass-through) 
or part of it (vGPU) is assigned to the guest (the VM). 

Is not clear what you mean with "pixel encoding". 

> > Virgl on Windows is not a thing yet, AFAIK.
> 

> > * 'Future scope' at
> 
> > - https://virgil3d.github.io/
> 

> > * GSOC 2017
> 
> > - https://gist.github.com/Keenuts/199184f9a6d7a68d9a62cf0011147c0b
> 

> > Depending on your configs, you could try Looking Glass for now.
> 

> > https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass
> 

This project is more about pass-through and possibly vGPU. Similar to our streaming 
agent, for the moment limited to the local case (host and client being same machine). 

> > Cheers,
> 
> > toso
> 
Frediano 
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