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Virtualbox 3.0 Announces OpenGL/Direct3D Support
bl8n8r writes "Apparently, Virtualbox 3.0 released today (2009-07-01) brings with it 'OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests; and experimental support for Direct3D 8/9 applications on Windows guests.' Maybe we can finally game in a VM?"
Well, hopefully this could put people over the edge to use Linux full-time (myself included). Many people currently use Windows for gaming, and don't dual-boot because it's a hassle. If I could run in Linux 24/7, and run my games without rebooting, either in a VM or in Wine, that would be excellent.
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You must get the host and guest OS to play nicely with each other. You can't just let both OSs directly access the hardware: what would show up on your monitor?
I find it quite cool that they just say it. Why not!? Good for them!
...Except for the fact his /. user name is... BillyMays.... Which kinda adds to the joke
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Gaming isn't the only thing that uses OpenGL.
3D content creation comes to mind (blender, maya, 3dstudio, etc)
But, as well, some audio programs I've used can use it for their UI (flstudio...)
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Interestingly enough, both WIndows 7 and VirtualPC come from Redmond, WA.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Ummm... for those playing along at home, you are talking about the Workstation product - which as you note, costs money.
The Server product, which is free, does not support the more interesting graphics APIs.
At least running on an OS X 10.5.7 host, 3D is definitely not yet stable - even OpenGL which is not listed as "experimental".
See here: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19352
Other than that, VirtualBox is very polished in general. 3D is just not a feature that works yet, and should not be used in a production environment.
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Actually, modern AMD and Intel chipsets do include an IOMMU. This does for devices what the MMU does for processes; gives each one its own virtual address space which is mapped to the physical address space.
The original motivation for this was using 32-bit devices on a 64-bit system. The first machine that I'm aware of to include an IOMMU was an early SPARC64 system. Sun wanted to ship it with a cheap 32-bit NIC, but this had problems when you have a machine with more than 4GB of RAM. If you send network data, for example, you typically send a DMA request to the card saying 'copy this data from this memory address'. If the card can only see 4GB of RAM and the CPU can see more, then a process may be asking to send data from a memory address that the card can't see. Without an IOMMU, the kernel had to first copy the data then send the DMA request. With an IOMMU, it can just map a region of the process's memory into the device's address range and do the DMA directly, which is much faster.
Using IOMMUs for security and then for virtualisation came a bit later, but it's supported by some hypervisors. Not (yet) by VirtualBox though, I believe.
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OpenGL already supports network transparency
OpenGL is device-independent, so you get network transparency for free. That's not really the same thing no matter what the SGI FAQ says. OpenGL lacks a networking component, so to say it has network transparency is a bit disingenuous. X11 has network transparency, which is why OpenGL has it in practice... but it's not part of OpenGL.
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