Apps requiring OpenGL/Quartz Extreme

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nsputnik
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Apps requiring OpenGL/Quartz Extreme

Post by nsputnik »

My host is OSX 10.11 and I would like to run an app in Qemu that requires an OpenGL compatible GPU with 64 MB of vram. I am running Tiger 10.4.11 on a MacMini with Intel integrated GPU. I see other users with other OS'es and hardware are able to do some tricky passthrough to the real hardware, actual vintage ATI cards in the PCI slot. Do we have any chance of utilizing my physical GPU to accomplish this in Qemu?
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adespoton
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Re: Apps requiring OpenGL/Quartz Extreme

Post by adespoton »

Check the ATi emulation thread... someone's already got basic passthrough working for an older card. But going is slow; don't expect full passthrough support for any GPU any time soon.
darthnvader
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Re: Apps requiring OpenGL/Quartz Extreme

Post by darthnvader »

nsputnik wrote:My host is OSX 10.11 and I would like to run an app in Qemu that requires an OpenGL compatible GPU with 64 MB of vram. I am running Tiger 10.4.11 on a MacMini with Intel integrated GPU. I see other users with other OS'es and hardware are able to do some tricky passthrough to the real hardware, actual vintage ATI cards in the PCI slot. Do we have any chance of utilizing my physical GPU to accomplish this in Qemu?
Sadly, no PCI passthrough support for macOS hosts, Apple seems to think that gimmicks like "Dark Mode" are more important that actual features.

I have had some limited success passing a GeForce 6600 PCI-E to qemu-system-ppc64 with the pseries virtual machine type on a Linux host. So hardware wise, it's doable.

As far as passing the Mini's GPU to a virtual machine, that can't be done on any host. What you want would require emulation of a GPU and passing guest OpenGL calls to the host GPU. Lots of x86 virtual machines support this, I even think qemu has this support, however, the trouble is Apple never opened up graphics acceleration frameworks for OS X.

So we can't write a driver, we have to emulate a card that already has drivers for OS X. This presents it's own problems, as we have to reverse engineer old GPU's that OS X supports. Also, the lack of threading in qemu-system-ppc means our emulated GPU is running on the same core and thread as the emulated CPU, slowing things down quite a bit.
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