[vbox-dev] D3D support in custom frontend

[Rūdolfs Bundulis]

Hi Vadim,

thanks for the pointers, I'll look up the code, I was already afraid that
something is simply missing.

To describe what I am doing:
I am running a research project in University of Latvia where we are trying
to use VirtualBox for large scale high resolution display wall construction
- basically we run VirtualBox with a custom frontend that takes the video
data from the VRAM, encodes it and streams over to a display wall,
currently we've been able to run a 9600x5400 surface with Windows XPDM (we
set this resolution as a hint and then internally split it to  5*5
1920x1080 displays) , which is really impressive, so thanks again for the
great software. In terms of resolution I guess this is as far as the
existing 256MB VRAM limit in VirtualBox can go (at least according to the
calculations for framebuffer needs provided by Klaus Erspenlaub and
mentioned in your code). Since the resolution limit is reached we are
trying to address two more issues - 3D support and a weird unaligned stack
crash in VBoxREM.dll with more than 1 CPU shared to the machine (for the
second issue I need to do some more research as to where it is coming from
before I ask any help here). As for the 3D - we'd basically want our
software to function in the same way the VirtualBox QT client does, but
currently it does not. Thanks for the pointer about the HGCM/OpenGL
service, I'll check out that code and see what I can adapt.

Our software basically uses the VirtualBox COM interface to create the
needed machine, set the number of displays/resolutions, injects the
IFramebuffer instances and powers up the machine via the IConsole
interface. So I examined all the IFramebuffer implementations in VirtualBox
frontends, and didn't see anything very special in the 3D related callbacks
there. As for the log - I tried to compare the log of a session from our
software with a session from the same machine under QT fronted where the 3D
acceleration works. Basically there were no errors and differences, in both
cases the logs contained the lines about OpenGL support (i guess this comes
from the OpenGL capability test exe), I'll send both logs as soon as I get
back to that machine but I doubt they'll give much help, since they don't
have any errors, and in both of them the guest additions log line states
that acceleration is supported. Basically the only thing that differs is
that the D3D/OpenGL (we've tried both API's, since the test application is
built on Unity it is trivial to force either mode) device creation fails on
our frontend. That is why I asked about the get_WinId, I examined the
miniport driver code and as far as I understood it uses the window id value
to create a swap chain. Out frontend does not have an actual window, so I
am always returning NULL, can this cause an error? I also saw that the
miniport driver has a lot of WARN macros, is  the output visible anywhere?
I tried using DebugView but that didn't help? Should I try building a debug
version of guest additions to get some log information?

Best Regards,
Rudolfs Bundulis

2015-01-26 10:34 GMT+02:00 Vadim Galitsyn <vadim.galitsyn at oracle.com>:

> Hi Rudolfs,
>
> In order to provide 3D acceleration, VBox HGCM/OpenGL host service should
> be running. It is currently a part of VirtualBoxVM process (ShCrOpenGL
> thread). In order to provide 3D acceleration support for your frontend, I
> am afraid, you need to adapt stuff from this thread for your code. And I am
> afraid this might be not that easy (there is a bit of magic when VBox GUI
> conversates w/ 3D stuff). Please refer to
> src/VBox/HostServices/SharedOpenGL and src/VBox/GuestHost/OpenGL sources.
>
> Btw, if you describe a little bit more why do you need this and what you
> already have done, maybe I could explain you more things/steps you need to
> do in order to reach the goal. VBox.log also might be helpful.
>
> Vadim
>
>
> > On 24 Jan 2015, at 14:14, Rūdolfs Bundulis <rudolfs.bundulis at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding why my custom framebuffer
> cannot use the 3D acceleration feature. I have a Windows 7 guest machine
> (3D acceleration enabled, guest additions installed) and a Unity demo
> application. Under the default QT GUI the application launches fine, while
> under my frontend Unity is not able to create the D3D device. First I
> though that this could be due to incorrect implementation of IFramebuffer,
> but when I looked at UIFrameBuffer::Notify3DEvent(ULONG uType, BYTE *pData)
> in UIFrameBuffer.cpp there wasn't any special magic there. Are there any
> hints to guide me towards understanding the cause of this? Is there any
> tracing facilities for the guest miniport driver? Also, I don't have a
> window handle for my frontend since there is no actual window. If I am
> returning 0 in get_WinId in my framebuffer can that mess things up?
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Rudolfs Bundulis
> > _______________________________________________
> > vbox-dev mailing list
> > vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
> > https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
>
>
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