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primus

Primus is a shared library that provides OpenGL and GLX APIs and implements low-overhead local-only client-side OpenGL offloading via GLX forking, similar to VirtualGL. It intercepts GLX calls and redirects GL rendering to a secondary X display, presumably driven by a faster GPU. On swapping buffers, rendered contents are read back using a PBO and copied onto the drawable it was supposed to be rendered on in the first place.

Both original and shadow GL contexts can use direct rendering.

A simple shell script, primusrun, is provided to help with testing.

At the moment primus does not advertise any GLX extensions to the client.

Building for multilib (32-bit + 64-bit) systems

LIBDIR=lib make && CXX=g++\ -m32 LIBDIR=lib32 make

Adjust LIBDIR variables above as appropriate for your distribution (reflecting how /usr/lib* are named):

  • Arch needs lib and lib32 as above
  • Gentoo needs lib64 and lib32
  • RPM-based may need lib64 and lib
  • Debian (with multiarch) needs lib/x86_64-linux-gnu and lib/i386-linux-gnu

On benchmarking

Please note that VirtualGL does not really display all frames it gets from the offload slave. By default, primus does render all frames it gets from the secondary server, except when the display thread locks up for longer than 20 milliseconds.

For an interesting comparison, play around with ipers from mesa-demos.