Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC] Xen Virtual Framebuffer

[Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@xxxxxxx>]

On 12/6/05, Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Now that's 3.0.0's out, I thought it would be a good time to bring up
> the topic of framebuffer virtualization.
>
> I threw together a proof-of-concept over the weekend of a simple virtual
> framebuffer/keyboard/mouse.  The basic design is have a vmalloc()'d
> buffer in the guest exposed as /dev/fb0 and mmap()'d in dom0.  There's
> also a simple message system for keyboard/mouse events.

hi,

A virtual framebuffer is probably a good idea, as this is an easy way
of getting legacy software like X11 running on Xen. My personal
interest is in getting xenified applications running with features and
performance comparable to modern systems such as OSX Aqua or the new
display stuff in Vista.

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to build an
accelerated OpenGL multiplexer for Xen. I serialize a stream of OpenGL
commands to one or more page ranges that I share with a viewer in
dom0, and there I interpret the streams, so that the result ends up on
the shared screen. Clients can utilize OpenGL display lists to avoid
the cost of interpretation.

Currently, I can run glGears and similar demos, including stuff that
uses texturing, at very decent speeds. I use the closed ATI drivers
for the FireGL in my T42p laptop. I have a Xen patch for the open
parts of the driver available if anyone is interested. It would also
be great to get the open source r300 driver working under Xen, but so
far I have been unable to make that happen (the old monolithic x.org
tree was a major pain to work with, hopefully things will be better in
the future).

This work is in some ways inspired by an older 2D display system I
built, for which I cannot release the source for legal reasons. With
that system, I was able to support 12 concurrent MPlayers showing a
512x304 DIVX movie at 25fps, on a 3.2GHz machine with a 128MB Radeon
9600SE card. I expect my new system to perform at least a little
better than that, while also supporting 3D.

It seems at this point the only way to get HW-accelerated OpenGL
running on Linux is through X11 / GLX, hopefully in the longer term I
will be able to remove X from dom0, in order to reduce the size and
complexity of the base installation.

Best regards,
Jacob

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel