from Hacker News

3D support for X11 guests

by eshizhan on 4/9/17, 1:59 AM with 73 comments

  • by justabystander on 4/9/17, 7:40 AM

    Virtualbox 3D progress has been unfortunately slow for a long time. It was kind of anticipated with Oracle's acquisition, as their laser focus on legal engagements and consulting pushes a lot of technical projects to the back burner.

    I'd love to see a bit more alignment between VirtualBox and Qemu. Even though KVM and Qemu's virtualized graphics acceleration is still a WIP, having a shared code base could accelerate the project on things like SPICE (https://www.spice-space.org/download.html) and Virgl (https://virgil3d.github.io/). Unfortunately, I think it uses a lot of Linux-specific technologies (e.g. KVM, Gallium), so the likelihood of sharing at that level seems pretty low. Although, supposedly Gallium isn't locked into Windows.

    Theoretically, if we could agree on a common host-guest interface for a virtual graphics adapter, it could share the guest implementations and host implementations could be added as needed. And it could be reused in multiple projects. But it always seems that this is the tech that never gets sufficient cross-project collaboration. And given the many differences between vendor hardware, a portable interface has been difficult. Maybe Vulkan will provide enough low-level functionality to ease the abstraction?

  • by hedora on 4/9/17, 3:42 AM

    Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not?

    (This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)

  • by hamburglar on 4/9/17, 2:57 AM

    I don't understand how this is a "dilemma." It's like saying, "on one hand, I really need to mow my lawn. On the other hand, I really don't want to. It's a real dilemma!"

  • by petecox on 4/9/17, 3:54 AM

    Obvious question, why not just run an X11 server on the host?

    Perhaps Oracle and Microsoft (WSL) can collaborate on supporting an X11 server (ones already exist) for Windows 10.

  • by eshizhan on 4/9/17, 10:03 AM

    In some ways, many Linux beginners will choose to use VirtualBox to learn knowledge. If there is no good user experience with graphics hardware acceleration, we may lose many of the open source community supporters.

  • by cpncrunch on 4/9/17, 4:48 AM

    I finally gave up on virtualbox and bought vmware instead for my mac. It works much better.

  • by tcrews on 4/9/17, 2:02 AM

    Never worked well and we turn it off in our Vagrant boxes.

    If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).

  • by eshizhan on 4/9/17, 2:11 AM

  • by harrygeez on 4/9/17, 8:47 AM

    I tried running Arch Linux on both VirtualBox and VMware Player on my Windows machine at work and Compton's performance is terrible. It's strange because it runs so well on VMware Fusion on my MacBook. Can someone recommend a better way to virtualize Linux desktop with composition in Windows?

  • by mrmondo on 4/9/17, 7:55 AM

    Virtualbox is so far past dead to me, terrible networking issues and performance, dreadfully poor IO performance and oracle to top it off.

  • by bhouston on 4/9/17, 3:37 AM

    Switch from vb to lxc/docker and you get great GPU driver support, even CUDA.