this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
47 points (98.0% liked)

Linux

11022 readers
740 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)

Also, check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Ategon@programming.dev
anzo@programming.dev
dwraf_of_ignorance@programming.dev
47
Flatpak Exploring GPU Virtualization To Ease Driver Challenges (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 5 days ago by cm0002@literature.cafe to c/linux@programming.dev
3 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Open-source developer Sebastian Wick has written a blog post outlining work to improve the graphics driver situation for Flatpaks. Particularly around situations like the NVIDIA driver stack that may depend upon a specific kernel version or where a Flatpak runtime may be end-of-life, dealing with GPU drivers in Flatpaks can be a burden. A solution being explored is GPU virtualization to deal with those GPU driver handling challenges while still providing robust and secure GPU access.

GPU virtualization is being explored by leveraging VirtIO-GPU and Mesa Venus to avoid having to deal with driver-specific runtime extensions and other complications. Sebastian Wick elaborated in a blog post on Monday

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] IanTwenty@piefed.social 10 points 5 days ago

It turns out however that the developers of virglrenderer also don’t want to have to run a VM to run and test their project and thus added vtest, which uses a unix socket to transport the commands from the mesa Venus driver to virglrenderer.

It also turns out that I’m not the first one who noticed this, and there is some glue code which allows Podman to make use of virgl.

Nice if podman and flatpak both gain from this work in future.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

This is the same technology that lets people play windows games on android with good performance. Because there is not direct access to the GPU, they have to use GPU virtualization in order to get it access to a Linux proot that runs wine inside.

I'm excited to see it being used and developed in other areas.

[–] BigTrout75@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

The nvidia kernel version problem stumped me and I've been running Linux forever. I hope they can get it working better. And don't buy Nvidia.