vfio and graphics passthrough

[yoni]

So I don't know if you guys have seen this but the linux community has figured out how to passthrough a graphics card to a guest OS completely. I was wondering if that is on the horizon of possibilities for parallels and macos or is it impossible because it's BSD and you can't recompile your kernel, etc.

I've seen some videos on youtube and it's pretty much the solution to gaming on linux and virtualization in general. People doing this are getting native FPS in a virtual machine, so it seems like something that might be worth looking into. If it isn't possible, are there technical reasons? And could those potentially be rectified by Apple?

Really curious...

 

[Hemnath@Parallels]

Hello yoni.

If it isn't possible, are there technical reasons?

The reason is the design. Parallels Desktop has no access to Mac's physical graphics cards. Instead, Parallels Display Adapter driver (which is part of Parallels Tools installation) interfaces with virtual hardware and provides 3D acceleration features. The actual acceleration is achieved by translating DirectX commands from guest OS to OpenGL API on macOS side. Refer to this page and this article for details.

I was wondering if that is on the horizon of possibilities for parallels and macos

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