VMM-Independent Graphics Acceleration

Graphical processing units (GPUs) are critical to high-quality visualization in many application domains. Running such applications in virtual machine monitor (VMM) environments is difficult for a number of reasons, all relating to the fact that the GPU hardware interface is proprietary rather than standardized. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of VMGL, a VMM-independent, GPU-independent, cross-platform solution to this problem. VMGL virtualizes at the OpenGL software interface, recognizing its widespread use in graphics-intensive applica-tions. Our experiments confirm excellent rendering performance with VMGL, coming within 14% or better of native hardware accelerated performance measured in frames per second. This is two orders of magnitude better than software rendering, which is 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. Our results also sho