Open-source developer Sebastian Wick has written a blog post outlining work to improve the graphics driver situation for Flatpaks. Particularly around situations like the NVIDIA driver stack that may depend upon a specific kernel version or where a Flatpak runtime may be end-of-life, dealing with GPU drivers in Flatpaks can be a burden. A solution being explored is GPU virtualization to deal with those GPU driver handling challenges while still providing robust and secure GPU access.
GPU virtualization is being explored by leveraging VirtIO-GPU and Mesa Venus to avoid having to deal with driver-specific runtime extensions and other complications. Sebastian Wick elaborated in a blog post on Monday
It turns out however that the developers of virglrenderer also don’t want to have to run a VM to run and test their project and thus added vtest, which uses a unix socket to transport the commands from the mesa Venus driver to virglrenderer.
It also turns out that I’m not the first one who noticed this, and there is some glue code which allows Podman to make use of virgl.
Nice if podman and flatpak both gain from this work in future.
This is the same technology that lets people play windows games on android with good performance. Because there is not direct access to the GPU, they have to use GPU virtualization in order to get it access to a Linux proot that runs wine inside.
I’m excited to see it being used and developed in other areas.
The nvidia kernel version problem stumped me and I’ve been running Linux forever. I hope they can get it working better. And don’t buy Nvidia.