User:Cmsigler/qemu guest graphics acceleration

From ArchWiki

There are multiple methods for virtual machine (VM) graphics display which yield greatly accelerated or near-bare metal performance.

Review of methods for qemu guest graphics acceleration

  1. QXL video driver and SPICE client for display
    • QXL is a high-performance display method. However, it is not designed to offer near-bare metal performance.
  2. PCI VGA/GPU passthrough via OVMF
    • PCI VGA passthrough currently seems to be the most popular method for optimal performance. This forum thread (now closed) may be of interest for problem solving.
    • Looking Glass
      • There is a fairly recent passthrough method called Looking Glass. See this guide to getting started which provides some problem solving and user support. Looking Glass uses DXGI (MS DirectX Graphics Infrastructure) to pass complete frames captured from the VM's passed-through video card via shared memory to the host system where they are read (scraped) by a display client running on the bare-metal host.
  3. Fully virtualized GPU support for the VM via Intel-specific iGVT-g extension
  4. Virgil3d para-virtualized virtio-gpu device