is there a vm that i can do opengl 3+ with? virtualbox and vmware don't

Question

I am trying to write some openFrameworks (C++) code in a VM. My host is Windows 8 and I've tried both Arch Linux and Ubuntu guests. My host computer runs the graphics code just fine with an NVidia Optimus setup and 8GB of RAM.

I do my main development in Visual Studio, however I do prefer to create Android and test packages from Linux. For this reason I just want to fire up a VM and take care of business. The problem is that some of my graphics apps need OpenGL 3+

Has anybody else had the same problem and solved it?

Solution 1

Try VirtualBox and prepend MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.0 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=130 to your linux command line. Some of the opengl3 functions may work. Though not all of them will. I used that to bring up Civ5, the animation did not show up, nor did the on-screen fonts.

If you want to see the source code:

VirtualBox uses chromium 1.9 that is opengl 2.1. The info can be verified by the glxinfo command. Use the following commands to track the VirtualBox opengl lib file:

$ ldd /usr/bin/glxinfo
$ apt-file search /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.2
$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo

Then follow links:

$ ls -l x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/
lrwxrwxrwx Apr 14 2014 vboxvideo_dri.so -> ../../VBoxOGL.so

$ apt-file search /usr/lib/VBoxOGL.so
virtualbox-dbg: /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/VBoxOGL.so
virtualbox-guest-x11: /usr/lib/VBoxOGL.so

$ dpkg -l virtualbox*
ii virtualbox-guest-x11 4.1.18-dfsg-2+deb7 amd64

$ apt-file list virtualbox-guest-x11
...

The source code tarball was virtualbox-4.3.10-dfsg.orig.tar.gz from trusty repo. The version string can be grep'ed by $ grep -r CR_OPENGL_VERSION_STRING * and $ grep -r CR_VERSION_STRING * in the source code directory.

Update 6/1/2017: Someone told me the kvm works for civ5. A quick search turned up this thread titled "GPU Passthrough with KVM: Have Your Cake and Eat it Too". The thread is too long to read, though hope it could be useful to somebody.

Solution 2

Give up on VirtualBox. VB's OpenGL guest support craps out at 2.1, even then only after you install VB Guest Additions from the command line with switches and then add some Registry keys to actually enable the OpenGL guest drivers.

If you're willing to shell out money, VMware Fusion for Mac and VMware Workstation for Windows both support DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3.3.

Solution 3

A bit late to the party here, but hopefully helpful for someone encountering similar issues these days:

The mesa software renderer now supports OpenGL 4.5, so for me, the solution is to disable 3D acceleration in the settings of the VirtualBox machine! The mesa software OpenGL support then takes over and provides its capabilities. It's for sure not that fast, but for my purpose (testing whether an OpenGL application starts and displays something under linux) it's sufficient!

Tested both on Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Comments

[AlastairG]

Please clarify what you mean by "prepend MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE...".

[minghua]

prepend to the beginning of your command line. like if you normally run "civ5", now "MEASA_GL... civ5".

[KcFnMi]

Good to know that VMware play well on Mac. Is it better than Parallels on this OpenGL aspect?

[prapin]

@KcFnMi Parallels only support OpenGL up to 2.1.