[Feature Support] Venus for GUI; Keyboard, & Mouse Emulation

[schiffy91]

With CPU virtualization and GPU paravirtualization, krunkit lays a foundation not just for hardware accelerated workloads – but also hardware accelerated desktop environments via podman.

[tylerfanelli]

Indeed it does. virtio-input devices have been on our roadmap for a bit, but other features have taken precedence.

@slp We've been asked about GPU acceleration for graphics workloads before. WDYT?

[slp]

@slp We've been asked about GPU acceleration for graphics workloads before. WDYT?

libkrun does support GPU acceleration for graphics workloads with Linux as the host (muvm uses it for Asahi Linux's game running toolkit). When both Linux are running in the host and in the guest, we can export a dmabuf from the first and expose it to the latter for using it as output surface.

With macOS as a host this isn't as straightforward. We would need to investigate how to obtain some kind of surface in the desktop, with a color format that has been negotiated with the guest, and either be able to share it directly with the guest or have some efficient way of transferring the info between the surfaces. This requires a significant amount of work just to find what's possible and how.

[tylerfanelli]

@schiffy91 I assumed you were referring to macOS hosts. Is this true?

[schiffy91]

Yes, that is what I was referring to!

[polarathene]

hardware accelerated desktop environments

I'm trying to find something that is capable of doing HW accelerated guest but with snapshot/checkpoint capabilities like VMware is capable of. Would anyone know what component(s) are relevant for tackling that kind of feature?

I don't need host-level performance with 3D accel, but I'd like to have a similar interactive experience as a desktop compositor provides along with apps that can be accelerated such as web browsers.

The main drawback in the OSS ecosystem presently however seems to be you can only have one or the other? (3D accel vs snapshot support)

I'm in need of a VM guest per project with multiple apps, then the ability to persist to disk to free up resources and restore at a later point in the same graphical state (text inputs, highlighted text, scroll position, window arrangement, etc).

Is libkrun, krunkit, muvm or anything else relevant here? I'm more than happy to constrain the guest environment such as to only Vulkan and Wayland if that makes this any easier of a goal to support.

[slp]

@polarathene we have plans for supporting 3D accelerated Linux desktops, but snapshots are not planned as of today.