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Re: [Xen-users] Xen handling of graphics card

To: Jean-Eric Cuendet <jec@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Xen handling of graphics card
From: Daniel Goertzen <goertzen@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:36:57 -0600
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Jean-Eric Cuendet wrote:


Obviously, with a Xen-aware graphics driver, it would be possible to
solve both of these problems. It is, however, not entirely trivial to
write such a driver for a decent modern graphics card. Trust me, I used
to work for 3DLabs as a driver developer, the source code for 2D side of
the driver is several megabytes, and the 3D parts of the driver are MUCH
larger than that. And I think an nVidia or ATI driver is even larger -
at least the binary is...


So if I understand well, to solve that we need a Xen driver (the same way VMWare does) that is then used by Windows. I understand that well. IMO, accelerated graphics is not high priority, if the card can just be shared by 2 domU OSes (Linux + Windows) with decent perf (like VMWare) then Desktop with Xen is near.
Hope someone with knowledge wil do that soon!
Anyone to sponsor me to develop this? :-)
Thanks for your great answers.
-jec


Xen offers vga emulation through a VNC backend. The Xen-Windows video driver you speak of would probably just be a VNC driver that turns graphic commands directly into VNC encoding rather than traversing the VGA emulation layer. Perhaps this beast already exists? Maybe this is impossible? I wonder what its performance would be compared to xen vga-emulation and the regular VNC server?

All that said, I'm sure xen vga-emulation and regular VNC servers are good enough for most purposes.

Dan.

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