4Guest Additions
4.9Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL and Direct3D 8/9)
The VirtualBox Guest Additions contain experimental hardware 3D support for Win- dows, Linux and Solaris guests.2
With this feature, if an application inside your virtual machine uses 3D features through the OpenGL or Direct3D 8/9 programming interfaces, instead of emulating them in software (which would be slow), VirtualBox will attempt to use your host’s 3D hardware. This works for all supported host platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris), provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place.
The 3D acceleration currently has the following preconditions:
1.It is only available for certain Windows, Linux and Solaris guests. In particular:
•For Windows guests, support is restricted to
•OpenGL on Linux requires kernel 2.6.27 and higher as well as X.org server version 1.5 and higher. Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 have been tested and confirmed as working.
•OpenGL on Solaris guests requires X.org server version 1.5 and higher.
2.The Guest Additions must be installed.
Note: For Direct 3D acceleration to work in a Windows Guest, VirtualBox needs to replace Windows system files in the virtual machine. As a result, the Guest Additions installation program offers Direct 3D acceleration as an op- tion that must be explicitly enabled.Also, you must install the Guest Additions in “Safe Mode”; see chapter 13, Known limitations, page 237 for details.
3.Because 3D support is still experimental at this time, it is disabled by default and must be manually enabled in the VM settings (see chapter 3.3, General settings, page 46).
Note: Enabling 3D acceleration may expose security holes to malicious soft- ware running the guest. The
2OpenGL support for Windows guests was added with VirtualBox 2.1; support for Linux and Solaris fol- lowed with version 2.2. With version 3, Direct3D 8/9 support was added for Windows guests. OpenGL 2.0 is now supported as well.
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