VMM-independent graphics acceleration

Abstract

This paper describes VMGL, a cross-platform OpenGL virtualization solution that is both virtual machine monitor (VMM) and graphics processing unit (GPU) independent. 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, coming within 14% or better of 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. Finally, the resource demands of VMGL align well with the emerging trend of multi-core processors.

Virtualizing Graphics Architecture of Android Mobile Platforms in KVM/ARM Environment

“…Many previous works such as VMGL [14], Mediated Passthrough [15], SVGA Architecture [16] and etc. have well analyzed x86 graphics architecture and shown various methods to virtualize graphics architecture on x86 platform using software-based virtualization.…”

“…One approach is to virtualize every graphics operation like API remoting [14]. This approach incurs high overhead, resulting in low graphics performance.…”

“…They can be classified into device emulation [31], API remoting [14], [19], device pass-through [32], paravirtualization [6], [21], and OS-level virtualization [20].…”

Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth: Transient PCs Everywhere

“…Fitting such applications into the Transient PC model is predicated on the ability to virtualize graphics hardware. This was a questionable assumption for many years because of the lack of standardization in such hardware, but VMM-independent virtualization of graphics hardware is now feasible [14]. Transfer rate results are the mean of 5 measurements.…”

pvFPGA: paravirtualising an FPGA-based hardware accelerator towards general purpose computing

“…FPGAs have been found to outperform GPUs in many specific applications (Che et al, 2008;Cope et al, 2005). Since 2007, many researchers (Dowty and Sugerman, 2009;Gupta et al, 2009;Shi et al, 2012;Giunta et al, 2010;Ravi et al, 2011;Lagar-Cavilla et al, 2007) have been focusing on making GPUs a shared resource within a virtualised environment, which would allow for adding GPUs to the infrastructure level of cloud computing. But the idea of adding FPGA accelerators to cloud computing (El-Araby et al, 2008;Gonzalez et al, 2012;Huang et al, 2010;Huang and Hsiung, 2013;Lübbers, 2010;Sabeghi and Bertels, 2009;Jain et al, 2014;Byma et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2013) still stays at an exploration stage.…”