Win Xp guest with 3d acceleration

[demonenero84]

Hello,
Is there a way to have a Win xp vm with 3d acceleration using QEMU/KVM?
I am aware that Vm workstation and virtual box support 3d acceleration for some guests, I was wondering if QEMU/KVM can have a vm with 3d acceleration to play old Win xp games
Thanks in advance

[TheFu]

Try using spice. SPICE is a display protocol that is extremely fast. It supports opengl.
Use glxinfo -B to see the level your box supports.

For example, on my KVM VM host, I see

OpenGL version string: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 460.91.03
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 NVIDIA 460.91.03
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20

But inside a 20.04 KVM VM (running on the same physical machine), I see

OpenGL version string: 3.1 Mesa 21.0.3
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 21.0.3
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20

virt-manager will setup a SPICE connection by default. Just need to load the QXL video drivers into WinXP. I don't know if those are on the web anymore (XP support ended a LONG TIME AGO), but that's where I got them. Inside Windows Device Manager, the video driver should say:
Red Hat QXL GPU in the Display Adapters section once correctly installed.

Google "spice qxl windows driver" https://www.spice-space.org/download.html ... there are links to Windows QXL binaries. None are labeled "WinXP", so I haven't any idea if those will work or not.

[demonenero84]

Thanks a lot for the reply
Just a few weeks ago I made a similar vm with a QXL GPU ( following this guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsVxjc3leQU ).
To be honest I was not aware about QXL GPU support for 3D acceleration I did not test any games.
Have you ever played any games with this type of vm? Is this solution a practical alternative to GPU passthrough to play old win xp games?
Thanks

[TheFu]

I don't game on computers. Sorry.

I generally run some ATC sims on Android and still use a PS2 with the most popular games from that time - SOCOM, GTA, GT, DDR, Ace Combat 4/5/6.

Inside the VM, I see frame rates limited to the same rate that my monitor can handle - 60Hz.

[demonenero84]

Thanks, I play a few ps2 games every now and than too, however I use an emulator not real hardware

[MAFoElffen]

One curiosity... What graphics is on your VM Host?

[monkeybrain20122]

virgl is quite spectacular on Linux guests with great frame rate, its goal is to attain near bare metal performance (beats QXL/Spice hands down), many native Linux games are totally playable. But it doesn't work on Windows guests. In fact seems that nothing short of GPU pass through works on Windows guests. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/QEM...s_acceleration

Also XP is a rotting corpse that should have been buried deep long ago.

[demonenero84]

One curiosity... What graphics is on your VM Host?

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050

virgl is quite spectacular on Linux guests

I have to try it then , I really like the idea of having a safe vm to play around

Also XP is a rotting corpse that should have been buried deep long ago

For me it is the perfect machine for retrogaming old Windows 98 and Windows Xp games, anyway WINE is really an impressive alternative for old games ( much better than Win 10 )

[TheFu]

Some games don't run well, if at all, on any newer OS than WinXP. Should we just through away our $500 game library? Not an option for us. I still play some Atari 2600 games from my youth.

I need for my GPU access to VMs to be network agnostic most of the time. Running on the same physical hardware seldom happens here. I'm probably unusual in that. The intel iGVT-g stuff that I've seen the last 4+ yrs has always been unstable. Crashing after just a few minutes. I had hopes for this for laptop use.

virgl ....

The project is currently investigating the desktop virtualisation use case only. This use case is where the viewer, host and guest are all running on the same machine (i.e. workstation or laptop).

For virgl, the documentation is terrible and it appears that rebuilding qemu is required. Cannot tell what releases are supported, which dependencies are necessary, and which hardware should work. Stuff like this is usually tied to specific, high-end, GPUs. I don't see any mention of GPU hardware. There is an 18.04 PPA from Stein, but I'm uncomfortable risking all my KVM VMs to just support a single desktop.
Without adding any new software, I attempted to get virt-manager to accept some settings for virgl. Eventually, got passed the errors, but got stuck with

$ virsh start regulus
error: Failed to start domain regulus
error: unsupported configuration: This QEMU doesn't support spice OpenGL

Which leads to the PPA.

So others who have more time to waste might get farther, faster, in the VM settings

Tab: Display Spice
 Spice Server
 None
 Unchecked
 Keymap: en-us
 OpenGL: checked (has a ! next to it)
    Auto
Tab: Channel Spice
 Device type: spicevmc
 Target type: virtio
 Target name: com.redhat.spice.0
Tab: Video Virtio
 Model: Virtio
 RAM - 
 Heads: 1
 3d Accel: checked

With the 3d Accel checked, starting the domain returns:

$ virsh start regulus
error: Failed to start domain regulus
error: unsupported configuration: virtio 3d acceleration is not supported

Just change the driver back to QXL and disable opengl support to get a working setup again - working, but without OpenGL support.

Guess I'll have to make due with

$ glxinfo -b
1336

That's the peak FPS under a spice connection over the network. The average with glxgears is around 200 fps.

[monkeybrain20122]

virgl ....


For virgl, the documentation is terrible and it appears that rebuilding qemu is required. Cannot tell what releases are supported, which dependencies are necessary, and which hardware should work. Stuff like this is usually tied to specific, high-end, GPUs. I don't see any mention of GPU hardware. There is an 18.04 PPA from Stein, but I'm uncomfortable risking all my KVM VMs to just support a single desktop.
Without adding any new software, I attempted to get virt-manager to accept some settings for virgl. Eventually, got passed the errors, but got stuck with
.

It appears to depends on your graphic card. For intel no further work is necessary, works out of the box with virt-manager on Ubuntu 20.04. With Nvidia you need to compile qemu from source since apparently the Nvidia driver doesn't play well with gtk so you need sdl2 but qemu from the repo (Debian) for some reason is not built with it. Also I am not able to start the VM with virt-manager (it can probably done if I figure out how to edit the xml but it appears that the option with sdl is not supported at the moment) but with command line it is fine.

I don't have an amd card.

Also the snap works, so save you time for compiling qemu if you don't mind snap (I mind, so I compiled)

BTW glxgears is not reliable. I have glxgears reporting higher fps in vm than the hosts on some machines which is ridiculous, another member on this forum observed the same. Try something else for benchmarking like unigine-heaven. with Spice/QXL I got average of 5~ 6 fps with low quality, with virlgl 80~100 fps with ultra high quality (on bare metal it is ~130fps)

You keep saying it is not for gaming but apparently you haven't tried. On here supertuxkart and some shooting games are definitely very smooth (there is a mouse/touchpad issuue with some OpenGL/sdl games which appear to be Nvidia specific). With QXL/Spice they are like slide shows. I don't know how it is over a network, but that seems to be a very special use case and involves other factors.