Xen users - Mar 2006 - hardware accelerated 3D-graphics in Win-XP-domU possible?

> Is there any way to make gaming in domU work?  It''s not clear to
me, if
> this can be done with open-gl or so.
For a Linux domU right now, your best bet is to use X protocol over the 
virtual network (but this will be slow).  For Windows, it''s not
possible now
I''m afraid.

Further in the future:
* Jacob Gorm Hansen has written a paravirtualised 3d driver called
"blink"
that may allow this (nb. currently for Linux / Unix guests)
* You might be able to give Linux guests access to a separate PCI graphics 
card using the PCI assignment stuff

If you want Windows games, I guess you could use Wine / Cedega .... ?  Of 
course if you did that, you might as well run in dom0 or on native Linux!

Further developments include efforts by some companies to develop a 
virtualisation-aware 3d graphics card that''ll support multiple virtual 
machines, and the IOMMU work mentioned.  It''d also be possible to
emulate a
full 3d card to the Windows guest, but it''s not clear that''d
be worth the
effort.

Sorry there''s not a better answer right now :-/

HTH,
Mark
> If this is impossible now, is some development planned in this area?
> Eventually I would wait buying my next pc until the necessary cpu features
> are available.
>
> TIA, martin
-- 
Dave: Just a question. What use is a unicyle with no seat?  And no pedals!
Mark: To answer a question with a question: What use is a skateboard?
Dave: Skateboards have wheels.
Mark: My wheel has a wheel!

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Is there any way to make gaming in domU work?  It''s not clear to me, if
this can be done with open-gl or so.

If this is impossible now, is some development planned in this area?
Eventually I would wait buying my next pc until the necessary cpu features
are available.

TIA, martin

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> > Further in the future:
> > * Jacob Gorm Hansen has written a paravirtualised 3d driver called
> > "blink" that may allow this (nb. currently for Linux / Unix
guests)
> > * You might be able to give Linux guests access to a separate PCI
> > graphics card using the PCI assignment stuff
> >
> > If you want Windows games, I guess you could use Wine / Cedega .... ? 
Of
> > course if you did that, you might as well run in dom0 or on native
Linux!
>
> Unfortunately every time I purchase a new game it''s not supported
by
> Cedega.  Half of the games are supported after a year.
:-(
> > Further developments include efforts by some companies to develop a
> > virtualisation-aware 3d graphics card that''ll support
multiple virtual
> > machines, and the IOMMU work mentioned.  It''d also be
possible to emulate
> > a full 3d card to the Windows guest, but it''s not clear
that''d be worth
> > the effort.
>
> If necessary I would dedicate a graphics card exclusive for the Win-domU.
> But the IOMMU work is still necessary.
Yep.
> I had thought a Win-XP virtual graphics-driver could forward the domU
> direct-x3d calls to a dom0 wine-proxy.  This proxy would use the
> accelerated hardware.  Ignorance about problems in this field leads to
> interesting thoughts ;-).
This is a bit like what Jacob''s Blink driver does (except that his
works for
OpenGL).  Doable in principle, just nobody is hacking on it at the moment.  
If it was made to work it would be extremely cool!

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Dave: Just a question. What use is a unicyle with no seat?  And no pedals!
Mark: To answer a question with a question: What use is a skateboard?
Dave: Skateboards have wheels.
Mark: My wheel has a wheel!

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com 
> [mailto:xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com] On Behalf Of 
> Martin Nicolay
> Sent: 22 March 2006 11:10
> To: xen-users@lists.xensource.com
> Subject: [Xen-users] hardware accelerated 3D-graphics in 
> Win-XP-domU possible?
> 
> Is there any way to make gaming in domU work?  It''s not clear 
> to me, if this can be done with open-gl or so.
It''s not currently possible to achieve this. The reason is that the
guest would not unerstand that the absolute (physical) address of it''s
memory isn''t actually where it thinks it is [the DomU OS will think
that
memory starts at address zero and ends at, say, 512M, but the hypervisor
has actually given it memory around 256MB->768MB]. 

To solve this, you''d need either an IOMMU implementation, which I know
there''s some work to implement the GART version of IOMMU for Xen - but
I''m not sure how well this will work with the fully virtualized guests.
A full IOMMU device won''t be avaialble from AMD until next year (2007)
some time (probably more than a year from now). 

The other solution is some form of para-virtualized driver that does
understand the situation of memory and such. This could be done with a
fairly trivial front-end/back-end driver pair, where the back-end driver
is talking to a user-mode app that actually does the drawing. Hans Gorm
Jacobsen has developed such a driver setup for para-virtualized systems
and OpenGL, and it works really well (I''ve saw a demo at Xen-Summit in
January). Of course, it requires a fair bit of work to support all of
OpenGL, DirectX and 2D graphics for Windows - there''s a lot of calls to
translate and transfer the information of. But it certainly can be done.
> 
> If this is impossible now, is some development planned in this area?
> Eventually I would wait buying my next pc until the necessary 
> cpu features are available.
I don''t think there''s any concrete plans for this type of
development
just yet. It makes sense to do at some point... 

I would think you''re in for a decent wait. 

--
Mats
> 
> TIA, martin
> 
> --
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> 
> OSM GmbH                               Mail    m.nicolay@osm-gmbh.de
> - Softwareentwicklung -                Telefon +49-201/8955-5
> Ruhrallee 191                          Fax     +49-201/8955-400
> D-45136 Essen                          Web     http://www.osm-gmbh.de
> ______________________________________________________________
> _________________
> 
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On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, Mark Williamson wrote:
> Further in the future:
> * Jacob Gorm Hansen has written a paravirtualised 3d driver called
"blink"
> that may allow this (nb. currently for Linux / Unix guests)
> * You might be able to give Linux guests access to a separate PCI graphics
> card using the PCI assignment stuff
>
> If you want Windows games, I guess you could use Wine / Cedega .... ?  Of
> course if you did that, you might as well run in dom0 or on native Linux!
Unfortunately every time I purchase a new game it''s not supported by
Cedega.  Half of the games are supported after a year.
> Further developments include efforts by some companies to develop a
> virtualisation-aware 3d graphics card that''ll support multiple
virtual
> machines, and the IOMMU work mentioned.  It''d also be possible to
emulate a
> full 3d card to the Windows guest, but it''s not clear
that''d be worth the
> effort.
If necessary I would dedicate a graphics card exclusive for the Win-domU.
But the IOMMU work is still necessary.

I had thought a Win-XP virtual graphics-driver could forward the domU
direct-x3d calls to a dom0 wine-proxy.  This proxy would use the
accelerated hardware.  Ignorance about problems in this field leads to
interesting thoughts ;-).
> Sorry there''s not a better answer right now :-/
Xen is a great solution of many other (server not desktop) problems for
me, so I''m reluctant to complain :-).

TY,
Martin

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OSM GmbH                               Mail    m.nicolay@osm-gmbh.de
- Softwareentwicklung -                Telefon +49-201/8955-5
Ruhrallee 191                          Fax     +49-201/8955-400
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com 
> [mailto:xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com] On Behalf Of 
> Mark Williamson
> Sent: 22 March 2006 12:29
> To: Martin Nicolay
> Cc: xen-users@lists.xensource.com
> Subject: Re: [Xen-users] hardware accelerated 3D-graphics in 
> Win-XP-domU possible?
> 
> > > Further in the future:
> > > * Jacob Gorm Hansen has written a paravirtualised 3d 
> driver called 
> > > "blink" that may allow this (nb. currently for Linux / 
> Unix guests)
> > > * You might be able to give Linux guests access to a separate PCI
> > > graphics card using the PCI assignment stuff
> > >
> > > If you want Windows games, I guess you could use Wine / 
> Cedega .... 
> > > ?  Of course if you did that, you might as well run in 
> dom0 or on native Linux!
> >
> > Unfortunately every time I purchase a new game it''s not 
> supported by 
> > Cedega.  Half of the games are supported after a year.
> 
> :-(
> 
> > > Further developments include efforts by some companies to 
> develop a 
> > > virtualisation-aware 3d graphics card that''ll support
multiple
> > > virtual machines, and the IOMMU work mentioned.  It''d
also be
> > > possible to emulate a full 3d card to the Windows guest, but
it''s
> > > not clear that''d be worth the effort.
> >
> > If necessary I would dedicate a graphics card exclusive for 
> the Win-domU.
> > But the IOMMU work is still necessary.
> 
> Yep.
> 
> > I had thought a Win-XP virtual graphics-driver could 
> forward the domU 
> > direct-x3d calls to a dom0 wine-proxy.  This proxy would use the 
> > accelerated hardware.  Ignorance about problems in this 
> field leads to 
> > interesting thoughts ;-).
> 
> This is a bit like what Jacob''s Blink driver does (except 
> that his works for OpenGL).  Doable in principle, just nobody 
> is hacking on it at the moment.  
> If it was made to work it would be extremely cool!
Yes, it''s definitely doable - and the beauty of MS''s foresight
when it
comes to a flexible driver design means that if you don''t fancy
implementing a complicated driver function, you can tell Windows "I
can''t do this" - either by returning a special return value, or by
not
giving a function-pointer to that function in the first place. Windows
will then work around the problem by doing it with more basic
functionality from the driver. For a 2D driver, this means that you
would only have to implement something like 5 different driver calls to
start off - anything else can be implemented as "speed optimisations"
later on. And this driver would probably still be faster than the
current QEMU emulation - as the current QEMU emulation uses a pretty
standard VGA driver, which doesn''t do much more than the bare minimum
in
"advanced" operations anyways. 

Obviously, to get good 3D performance, a fair bit of D3D has to be
implemented, but far from all of it. 

--
Mats
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark
> 
> --
> Dave: Just a question. What use is a unicyle with no seat?  
> And no pedals!
> Mark: To answer a question with a question: What use is a skateboard?
> Dave: Skateboards have wheels.
> Mark: My wheel has a wheel!
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
> 
> 

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