How to enable 3d acceleration in KVM?

[Patrick]

As for the disappointing performance…

@HulaHoop

Results:

Deeply disappointing.

With 3D enabled I got half the performance of without under comparable conditions (4 CPUs unpinned)

Without 3D I get 1/3 of the baremetal score. So with 3D that drops to 1/6.

Within the disappointing 3D on trials battery, it seems CPU no. does have a slight positive effect doubling the score from just assigning 1.

Maybe we’re still having the wrong QEMU command line? (Because our libvirt XML files configuration files might be non-ideal.)

Quote QEMU - ArchWiki

virtio-vga / virtio-gpu is a paravirtual 3D graphics driver based on virgl. It’s mature, currently supporting only Linux guests with mesa compiled with the option gallium-drivers=virgl.

To enable 3D acceleration on the guest system, select this vga with -device virtio-vga-gl and enable the OpenGL context in the display device with -display sdl,gl=on or -display gtk,gl=on for the SDL and GTK display output respectively. Successful configuration can be confirmed looking at the kernel log in the guest:

To check

sudo dmesg | grep drm

[drm] pci: virtio-vga detected
[drm] virgl 3d acceleration enabled

Note: DRM is referring to Direct Rendering Manager. Unrelated to Digital Restrictions Management.