Features/QXLKMSSupport

QXL/Spice KMS Driver

Summary

Currently the QXL driver is X.org only, a KMS driver is required to move forward with projects like spice 3D, and also to allow more features to be show in virt environments like plymouth.

Owner

• Name: Alon Levy

• Email: <alevy@redhat.com>

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 18
• Last updated: 7-24-2012
• Percentage of completion: 50%

Detailed Description

The current spice GPU driver for Linux guests is an X.org only driver. A kernel modesetting driver needs to be developed along with a new X.org driver that runs on top of it.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora acts closer to native hardware inside spice VMs.

Scope

• Develop a basic modesetting driver for QXL GPU
• Develop an acceleration/memory management interface for QXL GPU.
• Develop a new X.org driver on top of the new interfaces.

How To Test

• Test inside a virtual machine with QXL support, via virt-manager: create a new vm with qxl video (default of 64MiB) and spice.
  • plymouth should show up along with smooth booting.
  • X should work as usual.

User Experience

• There should be no regressions from the non kms driver experience.
• If the qxl module isn't loaded (compiled out or forced not to load via kernel command line) driver should work as usual without kms.
• Older drivers will not be supported when kms module is loaded. Fedora will update the kernel side by side with xf86-video-qxl so this won't be a problem.

Dependencies

• kernel changes - drivers/gpu/drm/qxl
• X.org changes - updated xf86-video-qxl

Contingency Plan

Do nothing, stay as we are now.

Documentation

See spice-space

Release Notes

New in kernel qxl driver that supports kernel mode setting.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/QXLKMSSupport
• git: kernel, drm, xf86-video-qxl