Re: [MirageOS-devel] Xen access to the GPU

[Dave Scott <Dave.Scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On 11 Sep 2014, at 14:07, Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>>> Xen domu can be configured to have direct GPU passthrough and  
>> 
>> Are you referring to xen pci passthrough ?  
> 
> No GPU passthrough (that's a new feature of Xen apparently). Note: I know 
> nothing about that, just read it on some blogs few months ago.
> 
>> If that's the case who provides the driver ? and the OpenCL or CUDA library 
>> (spoc needs that) ? Or the OpenGL library ?
> 
> For normal GPU, I think you will have to write your own drivers (or manage to 
> link them with mini-OS where you don't have the libc). But I'm don't know how 
> this work exactly.
> 
> But hopefully, vGPU will provide more portable front-end drivers that we can 
> use in mini-os, but I have no idea how far we are from that. Dave or Jon (or 
> someone else at Citrix), any input?

There’s no simple frontend/backend graphics protocol (unfortunately) so when 
people talk about vGPU they’re still talking about passing-through something a 
bit like a custom PCI virtual function. You’ll still need complex drivers to 
map OpenGL onto the hardware, typically written by the hardware vendor for 
Windows (and hopefully Linux, often as a ‘binary blob’)

I guess your options are:

  - focus on hardware which has open-source 3D drivers[1], and port to a more 
Mirage-y environment… perhaps the rPi would be a good target?[2]
  - take a Linux binary blob from a vendor and see what symbols it needs and 
attempt to build a wrapper (a bit like ‘ndiswrapper’[3]?)

Cheers,
Dave

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_device_driver
[2] http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper


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