VMGL support on KVM

VMGL support on KVM

[Cam Macdonell]

Hi,

I've been playing with VMGL and got it to work on KVM using two of the 
three suggested setups 1) X forwarding and 2) VNC.  However, with SDL it 
doesn't work yet.  This will require patching KVM/Qemu's SDL viewer.

Also, I haven't been able to get virtio networking going which is 
necessary as the network is the bottleneck to getting better performance.

I've installed 2.6.25-rc2, and have the nic model set as virtio and its 
using a tap interface.  I can load the virto_pci and virtio_net modules. 
  But I can't bring the interface up.  Is there any other configuration 
in the guest that is necessary?

Host and guest are both 64-bit Scientific Linux 5.0.

Thanks,
Cam

If anyone has questions about getting VMGL to work feel free to ask.

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Re: VMGL support on KVM

[Jorge Lucángeli Obes]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Cam Macdonell <cam@cs.ualberta.ca> wrote:
>
>  Hi,
>
>  I've been playing with VMGL and got it to work on KVM using two of the
>  three suggested setups 1) X forwarding and 2) VNC.  However, with SDL it
>  doesn't work yet.  This will require patching KVM/Qemu's SDL viewer.
>
>  Also, I haven't been able to get virtio networking going which is
>  necessary as the network is the bottleneck to getting better performance.
>
>  I've installed 2.6.25-rc2, and have the nic model set as virtio and its
>  using a tap interface.  I can load the virto_pci and virtio_net modules.
>   But I can't bring the interface up.  Is there any other configuration
>  in the guest that is necessary?
>
>  Host and guest are both 64-bit Scientific Linux 5.0.
>
>  Thanks,
>  Cam
>
>  If anyone has questions about getting VMGL to work feel free to ask.

Hi Cam,

I've been playing with VMGL also. I'm at work right now so I'll make
it quick: I'm getting ~35 FPS with 'glxgears' in the guest versus
~1100 in the host. That's around the same ratio as what the VMGL
author gets with a XEN HVM guest. What are your numbers? I've been
able to run with virtio but I did not see any significant increase;
that might be because I'm using the usermode network stack. I have
been setting up Xen on my test machine to see if I can reproduce the
author's results.

Cheers,
Jorge

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Re: VMGL support on KVM

[Cam Macdonell]

Jorge Lucángeli Obes wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Cam Macdonell <cam@cs.ualberta.ca> wrote:
>>  Hi,
>>
>>  I've been playing with VMGL and got it to work on KVM using two of the
>>  three suggested setups 1) X forwarding and 2) VNC.  However, with SDL it
>>  doesn't work yet.  This will require patching KVM/Qemu's SDL viewer.
>>
>>  Also, I haven't been able to get virtio networking going which is
>>  necessary as the network is the bottleneck to getting better performance.
>>
>>  I've installed 2.6.25-rc2, and have the nic model set as virtio and its
>>  using a tap interface.  I can load the virto_pci and virtio_net modules.
>>   But I can't bring the interface up.  Is there any other configuration
>>  in the guest that is necessary?
>>
>>  Host and guest are both 64-bit Scientific Linux 5.0.
>>
>>  Thanks,
>>  Cam
>>
>>  If anyone has questions about getting VMGL to work feel free to ask.
> 
> Hi Cam,
> 
> I've been playing with VMGL also. I'm at work right now so I'll make
> it quick: I'm getting ~35 FPS with 'glxgears' in the guest versus
> ~1100 in the host. That's around the same ratio as what the VMGL
> author gets with a XEN HVM guest. 

Hi,

To be clear, do you have VMGL running?  And you're only getting ~35 FPS?

For me, using VMGL doubles the performance of glxgears on two different 
machines.  As well, I'm using the "Enemy Territory" demos the author 
used and they are usable with VMGL but still jumpy.

How do you use VMGL?  Do you use VNC or do you have SDL working some how?

Thanks,
Cam

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Re: VMGL support on KVM

[Jorge Lucángeli Obes]

>  To be clear, do you have VMGL running?  And you're only getting ~35 FPS?

I have VMGL running, sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm getting ~35 FPS
running 'glxgears' with VMGL in my 32-bit Ubuntu Hardy alpha guest
using X forwarding. Running 'glxgears' in my Ubuntu Gutsy 64-bit host
gives me ~1100 FPS. Have you tried running 'glxgears' in your host to
compare with the numbers you get in the guest? I will try running
'glxgears' in the guest using just sofware rendering, to compare.

>  For me, using VMGL doubles the performance of glxgears on two different
>  machines.  As well, I'm using the "Enemy Territory" demos the author
>  used and they are usable with VMGL but still jumpy.

I have tried Quake 3 and it's not really usable in that same guest.

>  How do you use VMGL?  Do you use VNC or do you have SDL working some how?

I haven't tried looking into SDL yet.

Cheers,
Jorge

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Re: VMGL support on KVM

[Anthony Liguori]

Cam Macdonell wrote:
> Hi,
>
> To be clear, do you have VMGL running?  And you're only getting ~35 FPS?
>
> For me, using VMGL doubles the performance of glxgears on two different 
> machines.  As well, I'm using the "Enemy Territory" demos the author 
> used and they are usable with VMGL but still jumpy.
>
> How do you use VMGL?  Do you use VNC or do you have SDL working some how?
>   

If someone posts a simple howto with how to setup VMGL in a guest and 
host, I'll take a look at it this weekend and see if I can't increase 
the FPS by tweaking the virtio network driver.

virtio should get very good throughput but the latencies aren't very 
optimized yet so if VMGL is latency sensitive, this may be what you're 
seeing.  I don't know what is normal to expect from VMGL though.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Thanks,
> Cam
>
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Re: VMGL support on KVM

[Cam Macdonell]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> If someone posts a simple howto with how to setup VMGL in a guest and 
> host, I'll take a look at it this weekend and see if I can't increase 
> the FPS by tweaking the virtio network driver.
> 
> virtio should get very good throughput but the latencies aren't very 
> optimized yet so if VMGL is latency sensitive, this may be what you're 
> seeing.  I don't know what is normal to expect from VMGL though.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Anthony Liguori
> 

Hi Anthony

Here is one I made as I went along.  If it's useful I will move it to 
the KVM wiki.  VirtIO does seem to improve performance of an openGL 
video game ("enemy territory" used in the paper).  However glxgears gets 
better performance (more FPS) using rtl8139.  Perhaps a bandwidth v. 
latency difference?

http://warburg.cs.ualberta.ca/~cam/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=vmgl

Cam

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Re: VMGL support on KVM

[Jorge Lucángeli Obes]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Cam Macdonell <cam@cs.ualberta.ca> wrote:
> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>  > If someone posts a simple howto with how to setup VMGL in a guest and
>  > host, I'll take a look at it this weekend and see if I can't increase
>  > the FPS by tweaking the virtio network driver.
>  >
>  > virtio should get very good throughput but the latencies aren't very
>  > optimized yet so if VMGL is latency sensitive, this may be what you're
>  > seeing.  I don't know what is normal to expect from VMGL though.
>  >
>  > Regards,
>  >
>  > Anthony Liguori
>  >
>
>  Hi Anthony
>
>  Here is one I made as I went along.  If it's useful I will move it to
>  the KVM wiki.  VirtIO does seem to improve performance of an openGL
>  video game ("enemy territory" used in the paper).  However glxgears gets
>  better performance (more FPS) using rtl8139.  Perhaps a bandwidth v.
>  latency difference?
>
>  http://warburg.cs.ualberta.ca/~cam/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=vmgl
>

I can confirm Cam's findings, though I'm also getting better glxgears
performance with virtio. Quake 3 plays great in a 800x600 window on my
GMA 950 (Intel integrated graphics) laptop. I'll try and get some
numbers to compare.

Cam's HOWTO is important IMHO as VMGL does not compile by default on
64 bits. We should move it to the KVM wiki. The only thing I would add
is a big warning that the usermode network stack _kills_ performance.
I went from ~30 to ~1000 FPS in glxgears by changing usermode to tap.

Cheers,
Jorge

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