On Tue, 2017-01-17 at 18:49 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
I saw a blog post that claimed virt-manager 1.4 has the
support for 3D video acceleration in virtual machines,
then I saw lots of comments in the blog saying that
it won't work without libvirt support. Since I always
thought virt-manager just called libvirt to do everything
that confused the heck out of me :-).
Are there instructions of dummies anywhere about how
to get 3D working in a virtual machine?
Is there any chance it will ever work in a Windows
virtual machine (the only reason I have a Windows hardware
box is because I need to run an app that insists on 3D
support).
I've also been looking at this but the situation is pretty murky at the
moment as far as I can see. First of all, you need vfio support (could
that be what you were thinking of) but KVM now has that. However to be
able to run native-speed accelerated graphics you also need the
hypervisor to support mapping the video hardware directly into the VM's
address space without interference from the host system. This is
complicated to say the least. Some people have got it working by using
a motherboard GPU for the host and an additional GPU for the guest,
possibly with an extra monitor. This requires a feature called VT-d on
your Intel mobo (Note: *not* the same as VT-x), plus IOMMU enabled in
the BIOS, and h/w support in the card, plus a bunch of kernel mods to
enable all of this. Here's a 5-part blog by Alex Williamson to give you
an idea of how hairy it is:
https://vfio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/vfio-gpu-how-to-series-part-1-hardw
are.html
TL;DR: forget about getting accelerated graphics from sharing a single
GPU between host and guest. It ain't gonna happen.
poc