[Notes for xen summit 2018 design session] Graphic virtualization

From: Julien Grall <julien.grall@arm.com>
To: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>,
	"lars.kurth@citrix.com" <lars.kurth@citrix.com>,
	Andrii Anisov <andrii_anisov@epam.com>,
	Oleksandr Andrushchenko
	<oleksandr_andrushchenko@epam.com>Stefano Stabellini
	<sstabellini@kernel.org>, Paul Durrant <paul.durrant@citrix.com>,
	Artem Mygaiev <Artem_Mygaiev@epam.com>,
	Rich Persaud <persaur@gmail.com>
Cc: xen-devel <xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org>
Subject: [Notes for xen summit 2018 design session] Graphic virtualization
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2018 10:56:23 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <c05f24a4-6c10-282f-3945-c63dcee168ba@arm.com> (raw)

Hi,

Sorry for the late posting. The notes were taken by Stefano Stabellini. 
Thank you.

This has some clarifications requested from EPAM regarding PowerVR.

The existing graphics solutions on Xen today are:
    - PV DRM:
         * Supports multiple displays per VM
         * Based on Grant-tables.
         * Improvement of Xen FB which is based on foreign mapping

    - Intel GVT: https://01.org/igvt-g
         * Based on IOREQ server infrastructure
         * Performance is 70% of direct assigned hardware

    - NVIDIA:
         * Much more virtualizable
         * Provide mappable chunk of PCI BARs.
         * Userspace component emulates PCI config space

Current effort for graphic virtualization on Arm:
    - Samsung: They have a PV OpenGL solution. This seems to be fast.
    - EPAM:
         * PV OpenGL was dismissed because of performance concern
         * PV DRM for sharing display
         * PowerVR native virtualization (see below)

PoverVR virtualization:

Recent PoverVR hardware provided some virtualization support. The
solution is implemented in the firmware. A kernel module is used to talk
to the firmware via shared memory. The toolstack only have to setup
memory context for each VM.

            ** Recent PoverVR HW has some virtualization support
            ** Kernel module

It was not clear whether an extra pair of frontend/backend was required 
along with the PowerVR driver.

@Action: EPAM, could you clarify it?

Potential solution for upstream:
    - PV OpenGL
    - vGPU solution outside of the hypervisor (see below)

vGPU solution outside of the hypervisor:

A unikernel (or Dom0) based environment could be provided to run
proprietary software.

The proprietary software would use IOREQ server infrastructure to
emulate guest memory region used by the GPU and do the scheduling
decisions.

-- 
Julien Grall

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