QEMU with VirtIO GPU Vulkan support

With its latest reales qemu added the Venus patches so that virtio-gpu now support venus encapsulation for vulkan. This is one more piece to the puzzle towards full Vulkan support.

An outdated blog post onclollaboradescribed in 2021 how to enable 3D acceleration of Vulkan applications in QEMU through the Venus experimental Vulkan driver for VirtIO-GPU with a local development environment. Following up on the outdated write up, this is how its done today.

Pepper Gray

A major milestone, and for the adventurous, you can get it working today. Give it a few more months, and many of the versions required will be part of your ditribution's package repositories, making the process a bit easier.

On a related note, Linux kernel developers are considering removing 32-bit x86 KVM host support for all architectures that support it - PowerPC, MIPS, RISC-V, and x86-64 - because nobody is using this functionality. This support was dropped from 32bit ARM a few years ago, and the remaining architectures mentioned above have orders of magnitude fewer users still. If nobody is using this functionality, it really makes no sense to keep it around, and as such, the calls to remove it.

In other words, if your custom workflow of opening your garage door through your fridge light's flicker frequency and the alignment of the planets and custom scripts on a Raspberry Pi 2 requires this support, let the kernel developers know, or forever hold your peace.