Initial thoughts about F14 / GNOME3

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2010-05-20 at 19:13 +0200, Lars Herrmann wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 20.05.2010, 09:40 -0700 schrieb Jesse Keating: 
> > On Thu, 2010-05-20 at 10:37 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > > 
> > > For virt what we really want is passthrough GL, like other systems
> > > have.  Broadly speaking if you have KVM support (on a workstation)
> > > you're going to have a modern graphics card too. 
> > 
> > That doesn't help the remove virt case.  I don't run virt guests on my
> > laptop with intel graphics, because my laptop is resource starved.  I
> > run my guests on a headless system and use virt-manager to remotely
> > connect to them.  We'll have to have some fallback in those situations
> > right?
> 
> Novell tried to address this with Nomad for virt and beyond. No idea if
> this is still alive

Nomad is a very cute trick, but - ignoring the rather large amount of
merge work that would be required rebase it to a current X server - I
don't think it's quite what one wants for virt.

(The rest is based on some notes I took while looking into Nomad about a
year ago; I think I got it right, but my memory is a little fuzzy.)

Basically Nomad invents a new RDP subchannel for raw X11 traffic.  Your
guest X server is an Xdmx that outputs to this RDP subchannel, and your
viewer is a version of rdesktop that understands the new subchannel -
or, alternately, a version of compiz that understands the new
subchannel.  Which is cute, because it just shuffles all the X protocol
over to the viewer, so your rendering is as well accelerated as whatever
your viewer is.  But for 3D in particular that's less than you want,
because you're slamming everything through GLX, so you're limited by
whatever your GLX implementation can do.  Xdmx's GLX implementation
doesn't have support for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, so you can't run a
3D compositor in the guest.  You can still run 3D apps in the guest, but
GLX doesn't even have protocol defined for pixel or vertex shaders, so
GL2.0 and above aren't going to work.

- ajax
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