It's been a while since the last virtio-gpu status report. So, here we go with an update.

I gave a talk about qemu graphics at KVM Forum 2016 in Toronto, covering (among other things) virtio-gpu. Here are the slides. I'll go summarize the important stuff for those who want to play with it below. The new blog picture above is the Toronto skyline btw.

First the good news: Almost everything needed is upstream meanwhile, so using virtio-gpu (with virgl aka opengl acceleration) is alot easier these days. Fedora 24 supports it out-of-the-box for both host and guest.

Requirements for the guest:

  • linux kernel 4.4 (version 4.2 without opengl)
  • mesa 11.1
  • xorg server 1.19, or 1.18 with commit "5627708 dri2: add virtio-gpu pci ids" backported

Requirements for the host:

  • qemu 2.6
  • virglrenderer
  • spice server 0.13.2 (development release)
  • spice-gtk 0.32 (used by virt-viewer & friends)

    Note that 0.32 got a new shared library major version, therefore the tools using this must be compiled against that version.
  • mesa 10.6
  • libepoxy 1.3.1

The libvirt domain config snippet:

<graphics type='spice'>
  <listen type='none'/>
  <gl enable='yes'/>
</graphics>
<video>
  <model type='virtio'/>
</video>

And the final important bit is that spice needs a unix socket connection for opengl to work, and you'll get it by attaching the viewer to qemu this way:

virt-viewer --attach $domain

If everything went fine you should see this in the guests linux kernel log:

root@fedora ~# dmesg | grep '\[drm\]'
[drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[drm] pci: virtio-vga detected
[drm] virgl 3d acceleration enabled
[drm] virtio vbuffers: 272 bufs, 192B each, 51kB total.
[drm] number of scanouts: 1
[drm] number of cap sets: 1
[drm] cap set 0: id 1, max-version 1, max-size 308
[drm] Initialized virtio_gpu 0.0.1 0 on minor 0

And glxinfo should print something like this:

root@fedora ~# glxinfo | grep ^OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: Red Hat
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on virgl
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 12.0.2
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 3.30
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 12.0.2
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.0 Mesa 12.0.2
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.00
OpenGL ES profile extensions: