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

[Daniel Goertzen <goertzen@xxxxxxxx>]

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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