virgil3d local rendering test harness

So I've still been working on the virgil3d project along with part time help from Marc-Andre and Gerd at Red Hat, and we've been making steady progress. This post is about a test harness I just finished developing for adding and debugging GL features.

So one of the more annoying issuess with working on virgil has been that while working on adding 3D renderer features or trying to track down a piglit failure, you generally have to run a full VM to do so. This adds a long round trip in your test/development cycle.

I'd always had the idea to do some sort of local system renderer, but there are some issues with calling GL from inside a GL driver. So my plan was to have a renderer process which loads the renderer library that qemu loads, and a mesa driver that hooks into the software rasterizer interfaces. So instead of running llvmpipe or softpipe I have a virpipe gallium wrapper, that wraps my virgl driver and the sw state tracker via a new vtest winsys layer for virgl.

So the virgl pipe driver sits on top of the new winsys layer, and the new winsys instead of using the Linux kernel DRM apis just passes the commands over a UNIX socket to a remote server process.

The remote server process then uses EGL and the renderer library, forks a new copy for each incoming connection and dies off when the rendering is done.

The final rendered result has to be read back over the socket, and then the sw winsys is used to putimage the rendering onto the screen.

So this system is probably going to be slower in raw speed terms, but for developing features or debugging fails it should provide an easier route without the overheads of the qemu process. I was pleasantly surprised it only took two days to pull most of this test harness together which was neat, I'd planned much longer for it!

The code lives in two halves.
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/virglrenderer
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/mesa virgl-mesa-driver

[updated: pushed into the main branches]

Also the virglrenderer repo is standalone now, it also has a bunch of unit tests in it that are run using valgrind also, in an attempt to lock down some more corners of the API and test for possible ways to escape the host.