newbie questions

[Mattias Nissler]

On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 01:27 +0100, Hugo Espiñeira wrote:
> > I wouldn't even try playing most games. There is no hardware
> > acceleration of any kind available from within MOL, so no chance of
> > running games that have 3D graphics. However, I can play GliderPro
> > within MOL without any problems at normal speed :-)
> 
> Just wondering what prevent the autors of MOL of doing and 3D
> accelerated version of MOL. Once MOL gets OpenGL for the desktop, then
> the user experience between native MacOS and MOL'ed MacOS will be no
> noticeable.

Well, I have read discussions about that before. I think it could be
possible to do a custom 3D driver for MacOS that just feeds its input
into GL on the host. While this sounds good at first glance, there are a
couple of implementation problems and you will have to do a 3D driver
for each and every brand of guest system running in the virtualizer.

Also note that the situation regarding DRI drivers for powerpc macs is
quite bad. If you don't have 3D hardware acceleration on the host
system, there is no point of using GL for MOL graphics. Afaik, if you
have an nvidia card, you are totally lost. Luckily, my powerbook has a
radeon 9600 which can be used with the free r300 DRI driver, so I have
3D acceleration (although with some rendering problems).

The generic way of providing hardware acceleration from within MOL would
be to implement a virtual 3D graphics card in MOL. The commands coming
in would then be translated back into GL calls for rendering on the host
system. The question is which hardware to simulate. It can't be recent
ATI or NVIDIA, because these vendors don't even provide documentation
for writing linux drivers. Maybe an older radeon (say 9200) or intel
would be worth a try.

However, all of this is quite some work. If somebody really wants to do
it, I'm happy to give input and test the thing, but I don't have time to
do it myself. IMHO there are more important things missing in MOL, in
particular the filesystem bridge that allows you access to the host
filesystem from within OS X in MOL.

Mattias