3D Acceleration in Linux Guest?

[nepthar]

Alright, I've been googling and searching through support forums for about an hour now and I figured I'd just post.

I'm looking for a way to enable 3D acceleration in a linux guest (specifically ubuntu 9.10). I've found two possibilities

1. Gallium Drivers

2. VMGL

I've tried to compile/install both of them, but due to my lack of experience, failed. My question is this:

Is there any user-friendly way to enable openGL acceleration in VMware Player with a linux guest?

Thanks for any assistance.

[wila]

Hi,

I'm afraid there is no easy answer at the moment. I wasn't aware of the Gallium drivers and after reading it I'm still unsure if it will provide hardware acceleration for VMware guests. One would think so with VMware buying the host company, but..

The easy answer is to wait for VMware to finally have this feature added to the linux guests, but for now it seems the focus is on market share again, so Microsoft Windows.

--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[saphetiger]

I have been reading the development documentation for GNOME's upcoming 3.0 release, and it looks like this will be virtually unusable without 3d acceleration. I'm actually looking to use a Linux VM so that I can still have all of my Linux functionality while using Windows Natively for gaming. Though I have to admit that running things vice versa have been pretty smooth.

I would imagine that this would have commercial implications as popularly virtualized environments such as Novell SUSE and Redhat enterprise usually ship GNOME as their default Windowing systems. I hope that GNOME is smart enough to put options that allow for this, but I think that it shouldn't be that hard for VMWARE to provide at least minimal functionality in light of the industry trend across all platforms to include 3D accelerated interfaces. Microsoft isn't the only one in the market with these features.

[wila]

Hi,

Yes well I agree with you and am willing to bet that there are people at VMware working on this, but unfortunately I don't have inside knowledge about this either. VMware policy is to not talk about upcoming features.

Discussing the policy itself isn't very useful as that is the way it is.

But I do like your motivations on WHY vmware should get its linux OpenGL/3D implementation done.

Do you have links to support your claim?

thanks!

--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[saphetiger]

http://thefinalzone.blogspot.com/2009/09/gnome-shell-useless-with-nouveau-driver.html

http://www.kirsle.net/blog.html?id=66

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell

The first two links are random posts from people (one of whom was running linux on vmware) runnling linux without 3D acceleration trying to run the new

Gnome-Shell. The last is from the project itself, which states that they intend to make Gnome-Shell the default interface in GNOME-3.0 and that it will be a compositing manager (which to me implies 3d capability).

It should be noted, so I don't get flamed or anything, that gnome says that it will keep support for it's 2.x branch (which does not require 3D) for as long as they feel they need to. I would assume that in the absence of 3d support in commercial environments, that this (using the 2.x branch) may be what RHEL and Novell decide to do for the time being.