OpenGl software video driver for virtual machine?

OpenGL
1

Is there such a thing as an OpenGL software driver that I could use in a virtual machine (VM)?

My goal is to develop OpenGL software using a VM. Performance is not critical for my debugging and verification. The video driver that ships with RHEL5.2 make for some very strange OpenGL display results. Unfortunately, installing the latest NVidia drivers is not an option in a virtual machine (VM) guest.

I have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 virtual machine. There is no OpenGL hardware acceleration support in either VMware or Parallels when using Red Hat. Many OpenGl methods do not work properly, for example, displaying a 2-D bitmap as a texture appears rather mixed up.

Any tips or direction are much appreciated,

-Ed

2

What about using mesa in pure software rendering ?
Even GLSL is supported.

3

Thank you very much for the prompt reply.

That sounds like what I need. I tried mesa earlier today but my app that uses SDL still does not display the 2D bitmap as a texture correctly. Like it does on a physical machine with NVidia drivers.

I think I am missing something or I have not installed it properly. I am not sure if I need to recompile SDL or use different lib or include paths for mesa with my SDL app. It may still be using whatever OpenGL support was there originally. I will go back and try configure, make, and make install again. I am a Linux newbie and do not have a good grasp on installing and all the various paths libs can be installed in.

Thank you for your advice,

-Ed
-Ed

4

It probably depends on the VM, unless you’re going to do software-only (non-GPU-accelerated) OpenGL via something like OSMesa. See this thread.

5

Never mind - my OpenGL app works now using mesa.

make clean
make realclean
make linux-x86
sudo make install

Which installed the libs to:
/usr/local/lib

And the includes to:
/usr/local/include/GL

I put the lib path and include paths at the front of my project’s lib and include paths and all is good.

Thank you for your assistance and time!

-Ed

6

This topic was automatically closed 183 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.