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
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.