3D support for X11 guests • Hacker News Board

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#71

Post by stuaxo » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #40

hedora wrote: post #9

Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox, so is the dilemma whether to kill the project or not? (This is a serious question--what can possibly be more important to average virtualbox users than having a working desktop environment? Virtualbox has always occupied the desktop virtualization niche, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed...)

> Without 3d support, basically no-one can use virtualbox What? I can only laugh at such a statement Don't use hyped up desktop managers that need 3D to work.

It should be an option. 3D hardware is the best way we have to accelerate 2d these days.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#72

Post by i336_ » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 4:52 AM UTC

wila wrote: post #47

robinduckett wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use VMWare workstation?

Nah, VMware Player and VMware Workstation use the exact same engine. If you are having performance problems with VMware Player and are using either AVG of Avast antivirus then the problem might be the antivirus. See also [0] [0] https://communities.vmware.com/thread/553759

I was very curious so I read through that thread.

One person found that turning Avast's Behavior Shield off helped.

But with AVG... wow. AVG ships with a disabled-by-default "Use HW assisted virtualization" option buried in its settings. As in, install AVG and it turns that off systemwide until you turn it back on. Yay!

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#73

Post by logicallee » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 6:56 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #65

logicallee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"can't" is a strong word. why can't you do it in the user space within those VM's, communicating over a network adapter? If you don't care about putting on a raincoat, going outside to the Internet, and launching it up into the cloud, you can just install dropbox and get a sync'd directory without additional work. Obviously this is extra unnecessary overhead, two times, but for your use case you may not care. you can…

Bidirectional syncing primary use case is for development. Requiring a bunch of hacks and overhead is a terrible idea and controlling the traffic is not a useful feature for that use case.

I understand that, but it's not reasonable to ask that the VM intrusively modify the filesystem without the guest operating system knowing about it: therefore the "correct" solution is some guest userspace utilities for the user to install, which perform these operations from inside the VM. (If a 5 in a file changes to a 6, then rather this change happening from outside the VM, to the total surprise of the guest OS, as though you pulled the hard drive, mounted it in another computer, modified that one value, and remounted it in the original computer, all without the guest OS even being aware that the hard drive had been unmounted or modified, instead, it should be performed by a utility from inside the VM.)

The difference between this proper approach, and what you call "hacks" is minimal, and basically a question of packaging. To be clear, I agree that the VM developer should write and package these utilities for every major guest operating system it supports.

Re: 3D support for X11 guests

#74

Post by krzyk » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 3:36 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #56

krzyk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need 3d acceleration for using a system? GUIs work perfectly without any 3D acceleration. Are you planing on playong games? If so it is not a good idea in any VM.

I use a minimalist window manager, but I think I am in the minority, even among software engineers that use linux as their primary development environment. This almost works, except web browsers are extremely GPU heavy these days, so JavaScript laden sites (jenkins, amazon, news) often become unusable with more than ~10 tabs. Anyway, most engineers at work use unity because it is the default, and it is a non-starter…

Wow, Unity on a VM? I haven't seen that, actually I haven't seen any Linux user in my current and previous employers that would start any X apps on a VM.

Why start a browser there? Is it for testing the web pages in different environments? If not, then wouldn't it be more reasonable to start it on a bare metal (the machine you connect to the VM)?

But it might be my bias, I'm one of those that install Linux on a company laptop on day one :) so I'm most efficient in the console.