VMM-independent graphics acceleration

  • Authors:

  • H. Andres Lagar-Cavilla;Niraj Tolia;M. Satyanarayanan;Eyal de Lara

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Virtual execution environments
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We have designed and implemented VMGL, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) independent, graphics processing unit (GPU) independent, and cross-platform OpenGL virtualization solution. VMGL allows applications executing within virtual machines (VMs) to leverage hardware rendering acceleration, thus solving a problem that has limited virtualization of a growing class of graphics-intensive applications. VMGL also provides applications running within VMs with suspend and resume capabilities across GPUs from different vendors. Our experimental results from a number of graphics-intensive applications show that VMGL provides excellent rendering performance, within 14% or better of that obtained with native graphics hardware acceleration. Further, VMGL's performance is two orders of magnitude better than that of software rendering, the commonly available alternative today for graphics-intensive applications running in virtualized environments. Our results confirm VMGL's portability across VMware Workstation and Xen (on VT and non-VT hardware), and across Linux (with and without paravirtualization), FreeBSD, and Solaris. Our results also show that the resource demands of VMGL align well with the emerging trend of multi-core processors.