[Discuss] Are there any no-cost vm's still out there?

[Richard Pieri]

On 2/13/2015 3:11 AM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> Re: question of accelerated graphics (from a separate thread)
> hardware accelerated graphics != direct hardware access

They are synonymous. Linux DRI exists to enable graphics acceleration 
(among other related things):

http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/DRIintro.html

> While I can understand there might be some times that direct hardware
> access is needed
> for a VM, it seems to me that is opening up a huge potential problem
> from a security (and reliability of host OS) perspective.  Personally,

You're right. That's one of the reasons why Xen does not have full DRI 
support. On the other hand you don't get GPGPU processing and you can't 
do anything serious with OpenGL rendering. Lack of DRI makes the former 
impossible and the latter prohibitively slow. There are some DRI pass 
through hacks for Xen but they aren't especially reliable.

-- 
Rich P.