3D acceleration support for VBox guests

[Sander van Leeuwen]

This ticket is used to track development of 3d acceleration support.

I have committed my initial OpenGL guest support to the public SVN tree:

• ​http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/HostServices/SharedOpenGL
• ​http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Additions/WINNT/Graphics/OpenGL

Current status:

• communication framework between guest and host is present
• simple OpenGL samples are functional; they display their rendered output in an external window on the host for testing purposes)
• supported are only Windows guests combined with a Windows host
• not all OpenGL commands are implemented; most simple ones are

Plans:

• Linux host and guest OpenGL support
• Add OpenGL extensions as reported by the host OS
• Direct3D emulation using OpenGL

We are looking for external developers with an interest to help us out to complete this work.

Installation instructions:

To enable it you must add the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\OpenGLDrivers\VBoxOGL]
"Version"=dword:00000002
"DriverVersion"=dword:00000001
"Flags"=dword:00000001
"Dll"="VBoxOGL.dll" 

You need to build the latest additions from SVN as the OpenGL ICD mechanism needs a change in the display driver.

VBoxOGL.dll needs to be present in \Windows\System32.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

Even Rouault wrote in ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=2588#2588:

Looks like we're working on complementary things... I've updated tonight my QEMU (Linux) OpenGL patch : ​http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/viewtopic.php?t=2984

I guess it could be possible to reuse my client and server stubs even if you use a different guest/host data transmission protocol. I think I'm done with most of the core OpenGL API and the vendor extensions.