[Cialug] update

[Don Cady]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Matt Stanton
<inflatablesoulmate at brothersofchaos.com> wrote:
> The main advantage I would see in running Win7 as the host OS is that a
> lot of these VM platforms do not support DirectX for the guest OS (or at
> least not a reasonably recent version of it).  So, if the reason you
> have Win7 running is because you like to crack out on 3d gaming, it
> would probably be easier to use Win7 as the host OS.
>
> Parallels 5 now supports DirectX 9.0c and 9Ex, which is pretty much the
> highest level of DirectX most games use, though Vista added support for
> DX10, and 7 supposedly adds support for DX11.  As for VMware and
> VirtualBox, I haven't looked to see where their DirectX support is.
Virtualbox officially provides unsupported and 'experimental' support
for OpenGL 2 and Direct3D 8 & 9. (wonderful sentence that was, wasn't
it? <g> )
It's not marked 'experimental' anymore, but it's still a 50/50 tossup
whether a given OpenGL app will work or not. It's a "It works for you?
Great! ...  It doesn't work for you? Ok, file a bug report and we'll
get to it eventually." DirectX/Direct3D is worse. Direct3D is provided
via WineD3D, so every D3D call gets converted to OpenGL before being
passed to Virtualbox's OpenGL handler. And supposedly D3D 7 doesn't
work either (but I've not tried..).

VMWare provides support for OpenGL 2.1 and Direct3D 8 & 9. Of course,
expect your 'hit rate' to be better than 50%.
The neat thing here is their recent submissions of vmwgfx and matching
Gallium driver to linux. As I understand it, because of these drivers,
in the future we will be able to run multiple X, X Video, OpenGL,
XvMC, OpenCL, etc. tasks in multiple guests, being served to single or
multiple GPUs as we do with general purpose CPUs today.

Don